This seems like a bad faith reading of the english sentence here. The phrase "every other company" was not used. Obviously they can depress the value of worker's wages as a whole if they can prevent you from working at the competition - because a worker with a specific skill set will be best utilized at companies which are in the same field, and so generally in competition with one another.
Really?? I've lived and worked in Massachusetts and Washington, both states with very strong support for non-competes, prior to living in California, and, as a skilled worker (bachelors and masters degrees in computer science, mba, many years experience in tech) I've not had trouble working in many companies that don't compete with each other. And even in companies that do, as long as I wasn't working in directly competitive parts. And I've had collectively hundreds of thousands of colleagues who've also created careers across companies.
I mean, I'm in California so my employer can't prevent me from taking a competing job, but the contract does cover starting a business in your free time and they definitely seem to think doing anything on a computer competes with them.
