Licensure is also a good idea. Of course no legislature will ever pass it nor any company ever honor it with out the clout of very large tech worker organization.

More practical but less honorable would be an organization that fiercely funds large numbers of tech worker lobbyist since that is the only way the system actually works now. Also, since much of their lobbing would align with tech company interests, it would not be crushed with the same zeal.

When you're in a country where you have to get a license to braid hair, design interiors or manicure, you can't dismiss it as some exception that can be ignored.

Licensure is also a good idea.

Sure, if you're already in the industry, it's great. Lots of money to be made by keeping out those who can't afford to jump through the hoops. It's not like poor people really deserve to be programmers anyway.

Should your argument apply to doctors too? No restrictions on entering because people who don't go to med school will be locked out?

But do come over to the US, you can work as a serf under H1B, have no protections and many legal restrictions, accumulate no pension and be fired on your 35th birthday. But you will love the fact the manicurist don't have to have to fill out any paperwork.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/06/21/154826233/why-its-...

But licensure is licensure. The effects are not any less harmful because the people pushing for it are good unionists and not evil right-wingers.

Besides,

This isn’t just a random Utah law. There are more than 1,000 licensed professions in the United States, partly a result of more than a century of legal work. As the country industrialized, state governments wanted to protect their citizens and create standards not just for lawyers and doctors but also for basic services. It didn’t take long for professional groups to find that they also stood to benefit from the regulations. Over the years, more and more started to lobby for licensing rules, often grand­fathering in existing professionals while putting up high barriers to new competitors.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/magazine/so-you-think-you-...

And the idea that a Midwife should have absolutely no experience or that the preschool Teacher have zero background or your Optician have no education what so ever is pretty nearly crazy.

The only reason to get rid of it is so large companies could emerge to replace your midwife with a minimum wage incompetent.

True, maybe there should not any be requirements for hair braiding. This hardly means all licensing is a bad idea. To stretch one wild story about Utah hair braiding into "all professional associations are bad" takes more imagination than I have.

Eliminating all licensing across the board is shear libertarian crackpot-ism.

The idea that one of the people helping my wife give birth could have no training, or that people are being 'kept out' of the role because they don't have training or experience, seems idiotic to me.

This isn't the 1800's, where your midwife was 'the woman in town who knows the most about delivering babies', and we shouldn't act as though it is.

actual doulas may not wear tye dye or burn incense and I'm sure many provide an excellent service to facilitate some mothers through the childbirth process. Every labor is different. They may also be qualified midwives. And many midwives will also facilitate home births where appropriate for the mother and child. Basically, the US hospital and OB doctor-centric system is ... weird.

Thank $deity that strawman was burned to the ground.

Any government issued license is completely incompatible with libertarian values by definition. So no, not straw-man: crackpot.

- Some professional association call for licensure.

- There is a case of bad licensure in Utah.

- Therefore all licensure is bad.

- Therefore all professional associations are bad.

I would cite that reasoning as an exemplar definition of crackpot.

Or more likely since it lists a $30 license as one of the 10 most burdensome "licenses to kill for", it is just plain dishonest.

I assumed that you shared the article's reasoning since you linked it.

Uh, care to share where you read that? What I read was:

"Almost nobody is calling for wholesale abolition of professional licensing. I sleep better at night knowing that the commercial pilots flying over my apartment are trained and licensed."

"A bolder idea, of course, would be for states to get rid of the licensing rules that are doing more harm than good." (emphasis mine)

We don't see this very much, but people don't really demand it either. If people started striking for ownership instead of salary and benefit increases, I'd bet that'd change.

I've always thought that it might be an ideal solution to wage capitalism to force owners to sell equity to their employees at some predictable rate.