[lambdapie]

Economically putting up barriers for the sake of it (aside from valid issues of qualification required for the public good) is bad policy. It's good for the people who can get the qualification, but bad for everyone else. When you average it out, it's worse for society as a whole (this is roughly implied by the Welfare Theorem's of economics).

Your argument that other professions do it is invalid. In fact the government should be more proactive in ensuring that professions only impose valid conditions on employment, and don't add spurious requirements in order to exclude people from the profession, in order to, as you say "protect [their] careers and incomes".

[WildUtah]

Programmers have to compete with doctors, lawyers, accountants, actuaries, nurses, dentists, schoolteachers, and pharmacists when we buy a house or seek to influence decisions of the companies where we work. We have to compete with them in income, prestige, bargaining power, moral influence, and credibility with financiers. We have to pay the higher wage rates they have achieved when we need their services.

Unilateral disarmament has already led to a situation where 80,000 unregulated immigrants every year are competing with us while those regulated professions see few or none. We're not going to see them de-regulate in any of our lifetimes, because the theorems of economists don't persuade anyone -- except possibly computer programmers and we don't have any power or influence because we're not united to get any. So the best option is obviously to at least organize to get a fair shake. But so far there are few signs of that.