I meant attributing this to Obama was CNN's idea, not mine. Now thanks to your trolling, we are up to 4 posts about nothing but your dislike for me. How many you want to stop at?

For every one market failure prevented by the government im certain you could name 10 failures caused by governmental interference in the market. However, overall the market place does benefit from government intervention. There are many key areas, for example patent and copyright protection. You wouldn't enjoy the wealth of technological/medical/entertainment you do currently if the government decided that it would not enforce copyrights/patents. However for the most part, you could assume that if your goverment announced it was doing X in Y market that its overall effects will be negative/inefficient.

The government has a role in the market, no question. I just think at times like these, where we have a few businesses doing great and thousands failing, that leaving ticky tacky shit like this alone for a while and focusing on much bigger problems are in order.

The only companies this would even impact, are Big tech companies that can hold there own (MS, IBM, HP.. etc).

I just mean with all the problems in the US right now.. this is something they focus on?

If this was some stupid corporate welfare or hairbrained scheme like it usually is, then I would totally agree with you man. However as they are enforcing the competition rules, I have to stand behind their actions. Just because theres a recession, doesn't give companies a free reign to break the rules as the more companies which get away with it the more who will do it, its simply sending the wrong incentives to not act. Their actions don't effect each other, they are doing it to benefit themselves at the expense of their workers.

The reason why what they are doing is a bad thing is this. If they reduce worker mobility they can afford to pay them less, if they pay them less then fewer people will have the incentive to work in that field and in the end fewer people will be trained with high end qualifications in the computing industry and America will be less competitive internationally.

But that's just it, they are not reducing worker mobility. The worker still has all the freedom he/she wants, it's just that the companies are not going to send job offers out unsolicited to workers of other companies.

I used to be a consultant. After 12 years of it, I got tired of moving around, so I requested full time employment with the company i was contracted with. That was legal. It would have been against the law however, for the company I was working for to offer me a position unsolicited.

I see it the same here. The worker still has all the power, thus the employer still has to pay him the same. Where these companies get a "win", is they get to keep more of there corporate knowledge in-house, with less risk of intellectual property being stolen.

That's a small thing to worry about in todays times, if you ask me.

Fixed

It's easy to critisise Obama for how the economy is, but it is unfair critisism. Bush started the economic meltdown and left Obama to fix it, you can't expect Obama to fix it all overnight by magic. In a reccession you have to be willing to spend money, being conservative with it does not work.

Another day another mafoo-obama fail thread.

You do realize if they agree upon not "stealing" talent that it goes into trust territory right? Also that "stealing" is fine and dandy as long as contracts aren't violated, they get sued when they are violated however.

You do know those companies can survive someone "going after them" just fine, right?

My concerns about this are whether it is appropriate for the President of the United States to do this, whether the President has the authority to do this,  and whether these investigations are being performed for political reasons (and not legal reasons) ... There are already several organizations which are supposed to perform these types of investigations and have the means to perform them in a systematic, non-political, methodology which makes me believe the worst case for all of my concerns.

While I will never convince Obama supporters of the dangers of centralizing more and more power around the presidency while he is in power, I would suggest that they consider what the risk of actions like this is if an "Evil" Republican president was elected in 2012/2016 and decided to use these new-found powers to investigate companies because they decided to heavily support their opposition.

@HappySqurriel: Aren't the US antitrust investigators notorious for not doing much in the past few years? I remember that came up in a lot of recent articles about the EU Intel investigation.