The reason to ban non-competes wholesale is that they diminish the economic vitality of a region by inhibiting the formation of new ventures. This doesn't make them immoral; it just makes allowing them bad policy.
If non-competes are allowed, it's in every existing employer's interest to use them. This means that the constituency for keeping them is concentrated and well-funded, while the constituency for banning them is diffuse, consisting of the entire pool of employees as well as all the startups that don't exist yet. People who haven't lived and worked in California, such as yourself, may just not know what they are missing. So once they are entrenched, banning them comes to be very difficult politically.
I suggest looking at the issue from the perspective of competition between regions. It's ironic to me how much effort states and localities will go to to attract employers, when they hardly even consider trying to attract better workers. Companies come and go; workers tend to put down roots. When you get a concentration of highly skilled workers, as we have here in Silicon Valley, it naturally attracts businesses; the startup I work for now, for instance, could hardly have been formed anywhere else. And if it had been formed elsewhere, and tried to hire people away from the Valley, it would have great difficulty getting the best people, in no small part because they wouldn't want to sign a non-compete. I know I will never sign one!
If non-competes are allowed, it's in every existing employer's interest to use them. This means that the constituency for keeping them is concentrated and well-funded, while the constituency for banning them is diffuse, consisting of the entire pool of employees as well as all the startups that don't exist yet. People who haven't lived and worked in California, such as yourself, may just not know what they are missing. So once they are entrenched, banning them comes to be very difficult politically.
I suggest looking at the issue from the perspective of competition between regions. It's ironic to me how much effort states and localities will go to to attract employers, when they hardly even consider trying to attract better workers. Companies come and go; workers tend to put down roots. When you get a concentration of highly skilled workers, as we have here in Silicon Valley, it naturally attracts businesses; the startup I work for now, for instance, could hardly have been formed anywhere else. And if it had been formed elsewhere, and tried to hire people away from the Valley, it would have great difficulty getting the best people, in no small part because they wouldn't want to sign a non-compete. I know I will never sign one!