Part of the reason for licensing regimes, btw, isn’t that the licensing teaches you anything or that it makes you more effective or that it makes you more ethical or that it successfully identifies protocriminals before they get the magic piece of paper.
It’s that you have to put a $X00k piece of paper at risk as the price of admission to the chance of doing the crime.
This deters entry and raises the costs of criminal enterprises hiring licensed professionals versus capable, ambitious, intelligent non-licensed criminals.
Why are there mandatory licenses for many businesses that don’t seem to have high qualification requirements?
Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) suggests on Twitter that one aspect is that it prevents crime: