Competition is all-American: The Biden administration is right to move to ban noncompete agreements

We don’t know whether the Federal Trade Commission is right that forbidding noncompete agreements in labor contracts will increase wages by nearly $300 billion per year. Nor do we have a strong opinion about whether the ban can be carried out via regulation, as just proposed, or requires legislation like the wise bipartisan Workforce Mobility Act; the courts will suss out the inevitable legal challenges. Finally, we think it’s possible the FTC has written its rule a bit too broadly, touching almost all employees in almost all sectors of the economy. That said, there is absolutely no question t...