You can look it up in the Harvard Business Review, I think is where I saw it.  It’s been several years since I read it. 40 or so years ago something like 11% of the workforce required a government overseen license to do their job.  Now it is over 30%, approaching 40%.  Strong arguments in the academic article that it was about creating barriers to entry for a generation that had a lot of people looking for jobs.  Gatekeeping to allow practitioners to charge their customers more.

I don’t care if someone gets training to be a cosmetologist (someone who cuts hair).  I don’t care if someone gets training to be a cosmologist (someone who studies the universe).  I think most people can agree one can learn to cut and dye hair in a significant amount of time less than two years.  Couple months maybe with some on the job training?  Six months?  Maybe a bunch of side skills like aesthetics?   Or like many of our moms a few experiments with clippers, scissors, and a bowl in the bathroom, seemed good enough for millions of kids over the years.

The rush to absolutes is killing public discourse.  Propagandists want us to argue for or against issues in totality, instead of looking at the reasonableness of the reality of the current issue and the existing and or proposed changes to policy or regulation.