You have just realized that most actors in capitalism prefer to the rig the game rather than compete.

No idea how an increased number of vets would prevent capital from consolidating this industry.

You can’t have a monopoly in an industry with no barriers to entry. Cartels aren’t stable because every newcomer has an incentive to defect.

It costs more than zero dollars to set up a new vet clinic. I'd bet a bunch of the shit they need is really expensive.

Capital alone can't maintain a cartel. Investors can partner with doctors to set up a new vet clinic to help break the cartel, and there are significant rewards for both. In turn, the competition lowers prices across the board. Cartels are essentially a prisoner's dilemma without rules (like licensure) enforcing them.

Licensing can be used to monopolize markets and consolidate private ownership. Licensing isn't inherently bad but it can be used in a capitalist system to increase profits and drive out competition.

Capitalism doesn't become "not capitalism" because practitioners need to be licensed and public safety and/or public opinion demands regulations be put in place.

If someone recommends "don't do that" and you do that anyway, you can't reasonably blame their advice for being wrong because things went wrong when you did the thing anyway and then justify it with "well, sometimes people don't listen to your advice, so clearly it's not good enough, we really need to do more of the thing you advised against to fix this."

Are you saying that capitalism means completely open, zero regulation, zero licensure markets? Because it absolutely does not. It means (among other things) a competitive market with minimal information asymmetries between producer and consumer. Regulation can at time help this, e.g. requiring information disclosure, or preventing monopolistic practices.

Just because a lot of regulations are bad (or enforced poorly) and some licenses are onerous does not mean "regulation === bad" or "licensure === bad."

You're arguing against an extreme position I have not advocated for.

But when bad regulations cause bad outcomes, it's pretty weird to focus the blame on the people warning that bad regulations can cause bad outcomes instead of how the regulations are flawed and whether they can be fixed.

If your intent is to capture the market so that you can set the price, that is not capitalism. If licenses are limited, then the amount any one business can own should be limited. Having the ability and using it to artificially limit competition is called a cartel and should be illegal in the USA. An artificial limit on the amount of competition allowed <> capitalism.

See taxi medallions. Another example for a long time would have been FAA approval of new aircraft type certificates and the requirements creating a huge barrier for entry to get them that artificially prevented competition.

Capitalism kind of does become "not capitalism" when a small cartel of individuals uses these public safety rules to arbitrarily cap the number of professionals who can be certified. At that point, you have something approaching mercantilism. Rules can be good for markets, but in the medical industry in the US they are far past that point.

I haven't checked, but I assume that today there are more rules and regulations on doctors in the US than there were on the entire Soviet economy. Some of those rules are good, but most of them are in place because a hospital system or a medical association lobbied to put them in place so that they could keep barriers to entry high.

It's exactly capitalism because concentrations of capital form and end up with a critical mass that controls various aspects of society - in this case licensing. It's also something that's literally happening under capitalism, right now, in very capitalist America.

While I give your argument some merit, i.e. nobody should be able to corner a market, in this case a different concentration of capital keeps the supply low: the Big Higher Ed one, as opposed to Big Vet.

It’s a modern mixed economy. Full capitalism was the previous stage, when unlicensed doctors traveled around selling people radium cures.

It’s actually very surprising we trust doctors so much (have inelastic demand for them) because for most of history doctors were more likely to kill you than not.

It's not capitalism the same way soviet Russia wasn't communism