Let them leave. We have a government all the more for ourselves. We need not purchase products built with the exploitation of cheap, and even forced, labor.
You overlook the value of regional nexuses, and the positive externalities can dwarf the negatives of the taxes or regulations.
Ask yourself Nevada isn't Silicon Valley.
We're rapidly finding out this year that we don't even need to be in a particular place to continue working together, something that has only become true relatively recently.
It is dangerous to assume that things will remain the same as they always have been, regardless of other things that change.
There's obviously a breaking point at which people will leave. There's a thread here almost every day now about how everyone is moving out San Francisco.
Why isn't Sweden a hellhole? They have higher taxes than many other EU localities, but have a more vibrant startup economy.
The artifact that created Silicon Valley was the University of California system, and the location of military and national labs, a nexus of government and academic R&D, with a ready and waiting STEM labor force. It was not because it was a tax and regulatory haven.
- California doesn't enforce non-competes - which allows people to leave and form new companies. The "traitorous eight" are as much part of the founding mythos of SV as the acadmic/military labs. That is a regulatory decision.
- Founders and early employees get paid largely in stock or stock options, which are taxed less than salary. This provides them with capital to become angel investors in new companies and provide not only funding, but mentorship and connections. That's partly a consequence of the way capital is taxed. If you start taxing capital so that founders aren't left with enough to become investors, you'll break that feedback loop.
As always, if you "tax" something (or otherwise make it more expensive), you will have less of it.
Let's make an example. Suppose a "rational investor" in a globalized market is considering whether to manufacture a commodity in San Francisco or Jaipur.
The cost of living in San Francisco is 200%-2000% higher than the cost of living in Jaipur.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
The rational, by-the-numbers move is to put the factory in Jaipur because exchange rates make it radically cheaper. That's the real driver. Even if the would-be workers in SF made every conscionable concession and slogged for 25 hours a day, it wouldn't overcome the currency differences. Even if the workers in Jaipur had the most generous PTO and the most corrupt union boss, it wouldn't overcome the currency differences.
Of course, if you were pitching a town in South Carolina against a town in Pennsylvania, then maybe you'd consider numerically small differentiators like "how much extra do you have to pay for the 9th hour of work" - because small differentiators are the only differentiators available.
But that's not the issue with globalization. "Globalization" doesn't mean "moved from PA to SC to trim wages by 5% via lax overtime rules". It means they moved to Vietnam or China or Bangladesh to change the basic unit of measure with an aim to slash labor costs by 50% or 80%.
Why on earth do you assume that this is unrelated to workers protections? These protections aren't a bad thing, but to ignore their negative impacts can be shortsighted...
The remaining jobs in the US are salaried position where "8 hour workday" and "weekend" are often meaningless.
Plus we're talking about a wealth tax in California. You can start a company in Nevada and still access the market of California just fine.