If you can't own them forever as slaves then preventing them from freely applying their learned skills for a period of time isn't coherent and logical.
+ Absolutely false. Whenever you work for a company, you will gain knowledge that is their property - almost always. It doesn't matter who/what/when/how you work for - that knowledge is theirs. Even McDonald's workers are subject to private info such as operating details.
+ "For you to somehow by dint of experience BECOME employer property in whole or in total is a truly bizarre perspective."
Nobody is anybodies property. If nearly everything you know about a subject is a trade secret, then you obviously cannot use that elsewhere.
+ "If you can't own them forever as slaves then preventing them from freely applying their learned skills for a period of time isn't coherent and logical."
Would you children stop talking about slavery?
If your skills and experience are tantamount to trade secrets than you cannot use them elsewhere.
The idea that some company is going to let you in on their $1 Billion dollars and research, so you can walk across the street and hand it over to another company 'because you think it's your right' - is not coherent or logical. Put yourself in the perspective of the manager of that IP.
What is protected is defined in terms of patents, trade secrets, and non disclosure. It looks like the long term prospects of software patents is extremely grim and neither of the later items can be so broadly construed.
Your skills and experience can't be owned by your employer. It looks as if you actually understand that none of the above are so broad and want to use non competes to protect some sort of moral right.
The problem is that such employers are 0.0001% of the population the freedom of everyone else and in fact the efficiency of the labor market as a whole is vastly more important than some sort of moral right for Bob the employer to keep Jim the employee from learning the trade and using that experience down the road.
Your perspective is antiquited and based on a belief in an entire social framework of mutual employee employer loyalty that was always mostly imaginary and now practically fictional.
It's highly likely that you have personal issues heretofore unexpressed wherein you feel badly treated.
Maybe you should elaborate on THAT.