You won't get any argument from me there.

No one claims government has to be good. It's just that it gets a lot of outside help being bad. When the government runs the businesses, that's Communism. When the businesses run the government, that's fascism.

In the example I refer to in my essay, neither government nor business is immediately at fault. The certification scheme was being championed by a non-profit professional organization that still stood to gain financially by administering the scheme. No profit, but a whole salaried bureaucracy would be created to service the operation, and if you wanted to play you had to pay. Businesses were offering support because it gave them a chance to have the job candidates pay for their own vetting process, it gave them some litigation protection from the results of incompetent practitioners, and it allowed them to set up a two-tier salary structure by hiring anyone they wanted but paying top salary only to the seal-swinging certificant in the front office. Government would have eventually fallen into line because it would be under intense lobbying from "the profession" to institutionalize it.

You might be interested in learning how the scheme finally overcame opposition by senior professionals like myself in the industry who saw all this coming. They simply offered long-time practitioners a very generous grandfather clause that would include them without forcing them to undergo the same requirements that new applicants had to satisfy. I easily qualified for the clause, but I felt with my vocal opposition to the program it would have been hypocritical of me to accept it. It is only a matter of time before certification becomes a government requirement to work as a senior practitioner in the field, as it has in many technical disciplines. As an engineer, you have probably seen this process at work in your field as well.

Today, there are organizations that will help you set up a certification requirement in your industry, whatever it is! Even psychics and astrologers are acquiring certificates to help them legitimize and professionalize their own operations.