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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

> Congress did that already when it created the FTC and vested it with the power to decide what makes sense for trade and commerce. That is the role of agencies.

No, that's not how the U.S. Constitution works. The FTC is a member of the executive branch. The executive branch cannot arbitrarily make up laws and invalidate legal agreements. The FTC was vested with limited authority, to execute regulations that have been passed by Congress, not to make up their own laws as they go and as administrations change.

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You are welcome to that opinion, but the viewpoint you're describing is not one that is the prevailing legal precedent.

The FTC was created by Congress through the Federal Trade Commission Act, and it is explicitly empowered to regulate anything that would harm free competition, including passing rules like this one.

Congress is also free to decide that this sort of thing is an overreach and to further regulate the agency or narrow its scope, of course.

The is the legacy versus the efficiency government. The legacy government, your elected officials, have bestowed the power of administrative law (as distinct from legislative law) upon a multitude of agencies, bureaus, administrations, et cetera in order to decrease their workload. Their laziness and contemp for the duty they were elected to perform has caused governments worldwide to outsource law creation and enforcement to byzantine bureaucracies which, as time goes on, serve the public in a way further and further from their original charter.

That said, this may fall under the purview of the FTC, although it strikes me as more of a Labor Department area.

The FTC was created in the same way as other agencies, with a bill that passed _both_ houses of Congress and was signed by the president.

That does not give them unlimited authority or the authority to pass new laws and invalidate existing ones in the process. They can only enforce laws passed by Congress.

Congress does not pass regulations, they pass acts of law. The Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) is a codification of the general and permanent rules published in the Federal Register by the executive departments and agencies of the federal government.

When a CFR conflicts with the law and purports to rewrite state and federal laws (where non-competes are fully legal and have decades, if not centuries of precedence), it is venturing fully over into legislative territory.

You are being pretty shifty here. You were talking about laws congress passes, but now you are talking about precedent, which is something that happens in courts (the judicial branch). I'm getting the sense that you are a little mixup up on your civics.

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