Excellent analysis. I wonder if it started as self-regulation - and, did the courts step in first or did big government regulators butt in first.
It is the same incumbency kind of system the ancient guilds became. The original stated purpose is to provide a standard of qualified education or training (apprenticeship) in a trade, bug nearly as fast as the requirements of the guilds become the law, it becomes the incumbency protection racket that makes it all “by law” allows it to be. Were it just a standard someone can agree to in their practice, but not a legal requirement, customers could judge for themselves if they are getting better service, or not, by those claiming to meet that standard. Over time, the standard would achieve a majority of customers, if it was worthy of it.
Historically, people selling / bartering their services were probably clueless about health problems until a third party investigated and identified a possible pattern, not that a give problem was even close to being reasonably understood.
”… and, did the courts step in first or did big government regulators butt in first."
That’s a tough one, for me anyway.
Peoples' understanding of the federal government’s constitutionally limited powers seem to be based on rumors, hearsay, gossip for the most part. This has always given bullies the opportunity to infiltrate and use government power to fraud citizens by simply declaring that something was either “constitutional” or “unconstitutional” based on special interest agenda.
In other words, for a given legal argument, if both government and citizen are wrong about how Constitution should be interpreted, the government’s wrong argument wins by default.
Also, since many state governments modeled themselves on the federal government, they inadvertently based state policies on politically correct understanding of how the federal government is supposed to work.
This is not only a case of the blind leading the blind, but regardless that the states established the federal government and have absolute control of the feds through the Constitution, the blind states now submit to the blind feds, most federal domestic policy based on stolen state powers imo.
Something like that.
It’s a big mess.