[edrxty]

I think it's a case of people only caring about their specific short term individual interests in the narrowest way possible. They're not really a rational thing in any other domain.

Basically, if you have a zero sum game with two companies and one has better IP than the other, it makes sense for the time span through which the company without can't reverse engineer it. In every other case it means the groups of companies under the umbrella of non-competes will slowly loose to groups of companies in jurisdictions without non-competes.

To expand on that, if you objectively have some special sauce that you don't want leaked to your competition then it's a net gain for you and a loss for the rest of X industry (where X is finance because they're the ones who want this, not tech). In reality though, it's extremely rare to have sole control over an incredibly strong piece of IP that defines a market. In reality, everyone thinks they do because they don't know what anyone else has. Everyone has something that gives them an edge, hence being competitive in the market, but sharing those secrets within their local area can make the whole industry way more performant.

The law applies to everyone so if you can't have non-competes, neither can your competition. At a local level it will make groups of companies much stronger than their more distant competitors because they can share knowledge under the table at a much higher rate.