> The main idea of the non-compete agreement is that employers want to stop people from walking off the job and taking trade secrets to rival companies. If companies weren’t able to secure those protections, they’d need to pay lower salaries, and we’d all be worse off.

Anyone else confused by this statement? How do you make the leap from non-competes to higher salaries, or conversely, that a ban on non-competes would result in lower salaries?

I mean I think I can see the author's intent (that the company would need to divert funds from wages to somewhere else to protect their IP), but it seems like the rest of the article disagrees; namely, linking the Californian ban on NCAs to the innovative success in that state (and high salaries) would suggest that banning NCAs might foster higher wages. Intuitively, it feels like, in absence of a non-compete, a higher salary is the biggest deterrent to losing trade-secrets to other companies via poaching.