I think the tech anti-poaching lawsuit is kind of a strange case because these are the highly-paid employees, not entry-level laborers, and the free market for top employees is likely to increase inequality, which is sort of the opposite of the goal of the Sherman Act. It’s similar to how collusion in the NBA reduces wages at the top while increasing team profits as well as enabling higher wages at the bottom (sports teams are excluded from the Sherman antitrust act), making a more viable ecosystem (see Planet Money episode
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/07/11/628137929/epis...). So it’s possible that forcing a free market of top employees will increase wage inequality. And ironically, politicians now complain that these tech companies are paying too
much, driving up the rent of housing (thanks to the region’s restricted housing supply), since the lack of housing channels high wages into the pockets of landlords.
How should the Bay Area economy have grown in the past decade if we had wanted to prevent the poverty created by tech and landlord wealth? We should have allowed far more housing supply, allowing apartments to bid down rents and also allowing new workers to bid down wages. We should have had higher taxes on land, allowing the poor to share the wealth created by the increasing concentration of employment centers. And we should have had higher national income taxes, spreading the wealth from the highest-paid workers in the winners-take-all economy to the rest. But given the dysfunctional local government (restrictive zoning), dysfunctional state government (Proposition 13), and dysfunctional national government (low top tiers and low taxes on homeowner rents), the collusion that the tech companies did was not clearly a bad thing. The Sherman Act is about enabling the price signal to be the “central nervous system of the economy” (U.S. v. Socony-Vacuum Oil Co) to mobilize labor and capital. But when the dominant factor in the labor market is local governments’ restrictions on the housing supply which prevent mobility, I don’t see much point in enforcing the antitrust act against companies.