[cabalamat]

> I am incredibly happy that this will never happen in software development.

Oh I don't know, the idea of programmers being better paid has a certain attraction to me :-)

On a more serious note, the way that lawyers and doctors (and some other tradesmen in some jurisdictions) have managed to illegalise competition is wrong and needs to be stopped. Vets can perform operations for a tenth the cost doctors can -- is this because vets are less competent? On the whole, no.

[mister_chips]

I don't think that the competition is illegal. I thought that if you are a private practitioner of either you could just set your prices lower. The fact no-one does maybe implies that either there is a shortage of these people or that they really just do it for the money neither of which are true. I'm pretty sure the entrance criteria do not also include "you must charge X for this service". But I think we see similar pricing weirdness with mobile phone plans - way over priced but here in a free market (at least in the UK) we don't see prices that are really that good for what we get.

I'm pretty sure that salary dose play an important part of people wanting to get into these professions so while you have bright people doing them it is not always what they would be best at. So there is a bottle neck when applying for higher education and I think the problem is when you are 18 you have no idea what will make you happy when you actually graduate. By that point your pretty well financially committed to the profession and thereafter you'll be saying t least the money is good.

Also while I don't like monopolies how you break them is important and hard to do.

[cabalamat]

> I don't think that the competition is illegal.

Yes it is. The whole point is that certain professions have got politicians to pass laws making it illegal for people without the right piece of paper to compete with them.

As Adam Smith said: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public..."

[ippisl]

You just described 2 of the ways that the competition is being limited by law and politics: 1. Controlling the number of doctors graduating per year. 2. Making medical training very long and expensive(even when it's not needed - for example when nurses can replace doctors) so that doctors would inevitably charge higher rates in the future.

Since medicine historically was distributed and built by community doctors , the classic competition limiting strategy of using big monopolies didn't fit here.

So the medical profession uses many different strategies for limiting "distributed" competition.