Blanket non-competes undermine the creative destruction process in modern economies. They will end up hurting the companies using them by making it harder for successful firms to expand quickly and keeping less successful firms afloat longer. The problem is individual companies lose little in the short run by putting them on their own employees.<p>The answer is to make non-competes unenforceable across the US in the way they are in California, which makes them generally unforceable but adds reasonable exceptions for situations like selling a company to an acquirer.