Uh, what? Jon Rubenstein was poaching people from Apple to Palm. He is a sociopath for doing so?

People follow individual leaders from company to company a lot. Sometimes the source company wants to stop that, and can in some jurisdictions.

Could be wrong but I think you've got his argument backwards; I think he's saying that by allowing a company (by law or coercion) to prevent an executive from 'poaching' employees, you're treating those employees like property, rather than rational beings.

I think he's arguing that people should be completely free of coercion to choose where they work.

Exactly right, cloverich.

Seemed to me he was claiming both the poacher and preventer of poaching are treating people as property. But I can see my mistake.

In any case , I don't see either action as sociopathic. It's normal for people with power to want to use it.

The sociopath is one willing restrict to someone else's choice for his own gain, or one who is willing to condone such behavior. Yes, that's what many businessmen or people in power do. No, it does not mean we have to like them or let them be. Mosquitos bite people too, and it doesn't mean we should like them or avoid making it harder for them to act on their predatory instincts.

Condoning coercion is not what a sociopath is, nor is it necessarily indicative of sociopathic behaviour, by any psychological standard.

Coercion is a pretty normal human activity, throughout history. You can't get rid of it (not even the utopian libertarian society would). The coerced usually don't like it, but that's to be expected.

Mainly the question is how a society limits the power to coerce. In this case, I'm not against Uncle Sam stepping in to prevent collusion. I just don't see it as immoral. A conflict of interest, yes. But I see this specific incident more about anti-solicitation, which is a legal and enforceable contract clause in much of the USA. In California, you have to try harder. Hardly sociopathic.