> But in our world, dealing this way might get nasty with some people. "Pay me $$$ or I am leaving for XYZ tomorrow".
I wouldn't call that greed, I'd call that "the employee demanding their true market value." Employers get the right to fire people and replace them with cheap labor overseas (for example), it's only fair that laborers retain the right to leverage competing employers off of one another.
> finding a technologist (or whatever) for such a company is a bit harder than finding a jQuery or Rails guy
Then the market demands that they be payed accordingly.
> [Anticipated words I'm putting into your mouth:] "You seem awfully focused on the market for someone arguing in favor of regulation."
I like markets, but they have many well-known pathologies, and I see nothing wrong with addressing those with regulation. In this case, the issue is that the market can remain irrational longer than someone at the bottom can remain solvent. Sure, in some sense you could say that people who don't read their contracts and demand better terms deserve to be punished. But the market doesn't just punish them, it punishes the people who try to negotiate for better terms. Who would hire a smart worker when a dumb worker can be tricked into doing the same job for less?
This is why we ban contracts involving slavery and indentured servitude. If they were allowed, 1/4 of the population would unwittingly walk into the trap-contracts. Even if they were perfectly rational, the next 1/4 would be forced to sign similar contracts by the fact that they had to compete with the irrational 1/4 on price (otherwise they starve). Regulations against this kind of thing don't just protect people from themselves (which is arguably something government shouldn't do), they protect rational workers from irrational workers. The market needs them to function (for any reasonable definition of "function"), and that makes them a good thing.