There are sound arguments against professional licensing, yes. You may not find them discussed on this forum much but the arguments for and against licensing st

There are sound arguments against professional licensing, yes. You may not find them discussed on this forum much but the arguments for and against licensing stretch back hundreds of years. A few arguments you could search for, if you want to dig deeper: - Licensing is used to restrict entry into the profession to prop up wages, i.e. it often turns into a form of wage cartel. In extreme cases it can degrade into a pure cartel without any connection to actual professional practice; NY taxi medallions are an example of this in which the license is tradable and rentable, because buying one costs millions of dollars. - The qualifications requirements are often either redundant (everyone was asking for them anyway) or obsolete (the industry has changed but everyone still has to pass these tests). Obsolete licensing rules are often impossible to get rid of because the people who put effort into passing them don't want to see their "investment" be invalidated. Again using taxi licensing as an example, black cab drivers in London have to literally memorize the street map of central London such that they can recite a set of street directions from any arbitrarily chosen A to B, on demand, from memory. It's called The Knowledge and there are examiners who test this. Just last week a newly qualified cabby was telling me about this. He recounted on how his first day he discovered that the Knowledge was useless for actual navigation because you can't memorize traffic conditions. So now he uses Google Maps/Waze anyway, because it lets you see congestion. The Knowledge became largely irrelevant with the arrival of high quality GPS units, but it lives on decades later because the licensing bodies won't remove a rule that gives them power and cabbies aren't allowed to deviate from it/like the way it keeps out low cost competition. - Licensing can be abused for political purposes. The threat of medical license revocation is routinely deployed to silence criticism of government policies on COVID or COVID vaccines. - Licensing is often subtractive rather than additive. The licensed software developer's answer to writing engine control code safely without bugs is MISRA-C. This takes C and tries to make it safe by writing down lots of rules to follow which get steadily more restrictive with time (MISRA-C:2012 contains 143 rules and 16 directives). The unlicensed software developer's answer to writing safe embedded code is Rust - the rules would say you have to use MISRA-C, so there'd be no point trying to go beyond it. Moreover nobody would have developed Rust because the internal drive for self improvement would be gone. The sort of people who created Rust are not the sort of people who also enjoy political lobbying, and the sort of people who funded it would have lost their motivation if they could just say "we comply with all relevant regulations" and wash their hands of errors.