This is the same model of all licenses, which is inherited from the guild system common throughout all of human history (the government (monarchs, oligarchies, democracies) protect favored industries from competition).

I put them on a spectrum:

- Licenses that anyone can obtain by showing the requisite skills. This is the least nefarious, and the clearest example would be driver's licenses. In a perfect world anyone can apply for and receive a driver's license. It gets corrupted by requiring training from other state-approved schools, but in its purest form it achieves, "If you can pass the driver's test, you get a license." Interestingly enough even advanced degrees sometimes achieve this goal - in California anyone can take the bar exam and get licensed to practice law without ever attending an accredited law school. Every other state requires you to attend law school (and the required cost / debt) before getting licensed.

- Licenses that you can obtain only after attending approved schools. This would be doctors, dentists, accountants, and nearly every lawyer (see above). The filter for the guild is getting into the approved school. If you manage to get accepted into and complete the program, you will succeed in getting licensed based on raw intelligence (meritocracy). The primary filter that protects the guild is getting into the approved schools (although there exists a subset of people who make it into school and fail the license exam, most commonly in law).

- Licenses that anyone can get, but require some absurd amount of hours of training, which usually costs absurd amounts of money that achieves nothing and are government mandated because of various entities that lobby politicians. These would be all of the blue-collar guilds like hair stylists, interior decorators, and being a florist in Louisiana (seriously - https://www.kplctv.com/story/37848470/requirements-for-louis...). You can learn the basics of hygiene and sweeping hair in a 60 minute youtube video, but the 1000 hour requirement in a for-profit cosmetology school in Massachusetts (https://www.mass.gov/service-details/how-can-i-become-a-cosm...) is absolutely absurd, especially considering becoming an EMT - someone that literally saves lives and gets dying people to hospitals - is a $950 six-month part time program (https://www.boston.gov/departments/emergency-medical-service...). Even worse, very rarely these licenses are transferrable between states, making the blue collar employee both indebted and chained to a particular area.

- Licenses that anyone can get, but are purely graded on a curve in order to protect existing members. Finally we get to the actuarial licenses! Similar licenses would be Michelin star restaurants and wine sommeliers. Only a very small community appreciates these licenses, but the value to those that have them is high via the artificial scarcity. In order to keep them fair they offer the test(s) to anyone, but grade on an absurdly difficult curve to make them essentially random, and then take only the top scorers to preserve their scarcity. The process to get the license is to cram test exams ad infinitum and continue to take the test until you randomly get the top score. They ultimately mean nothing, at least compared to the amount of people who deserve the license vs. those that have them.

In summation, licenses are an atrocious relic of a bygone era, but because of economic incentives they live on in a variety of forms and have little chance of ever being eliminated.

Addendum - occasionally I will see an HN poster asking why there isn't some sort of certification or license for software engineers (perhaps in some countries these exist, but not in the USA where software engineers are the top-tier of salaries across all industries). My argument against this is that the lack of licenses is exactly why US tech companies dominate the world - anyone can succeed whether they are an ethnic or sexual minority, autistic / neuroatypical, paraplegic, etc. can learn to code and make an impact - and at any age! Licenses mean nothing to technology, and the moment they appear is a signal that something significant has changed and the industry in that country will collapse when compared to all the other countries that don't artificially restrict talent.