There's probably a tighter labour market for physicians, yet no one claims we should de-regulate their standards of professional practice. And, while morality

There's probably a tighter labour market for physicians, yet no one claims we should de-regulate their standards of professional practice. And, while morality and competency may not be correlated, ethics and quality certainly are. Codes of practice invariably include clauses around providing quality work, guarding the best interests of your client, avoiding conflicts of interest, obeying pertinent regulations and laws, etc. And it need not be the entire profession: in Engineering, technicians and technologists often do much of the work, but the product cannot ship without an Engineer (who is governed by a code of practice and faces a variety of sanctions for violating it) signing off on it. Simply adding that sort of requirement for public contracts, FCC sign off, etc. would go a long way to enforcing a code. Advancement beyond a certain level would require that you meet the training and experience standards of the profession. Again, we already do this with lots of professions (including Software Engineering in some jurisdictions)---pretending that it somehow couldn't be done for developers needs better evidence than anything I've yet seen. Of course you can always buy cheaper products from non-professionals. You can do that with medicine and product safety already. And you get precisely what you pay for.