Long ago and far away I closed down a small head hunting practice in Connecticut over licensing requirements I could not meet that were designed by the large entrenched players to be difficult to meet by small executive search companies. I’ve moved on, but I hope Small Cheese figures out a way to sue the living bejeesus out of Big Cheese and Uncle Sam.
A lot of businesses lobby State gov’t to require education and other licensing requirements, sometimes for simple professions, just to keep away competition.
Your experience is the very definition of Fascism.
An inherent aspect of fascist economies was economic dirigisme, meaning an economy where the government exerts strong directive influence, and effectively controls production and allocation of resources. In general, apart from the nationalizations of some industries, fascist economies were based on private property and private initiative, but these were contingent upon service to the state.Fascism operated from a Social Darwinist view of human relations. The aim was to promote superior individuals and weed out the weak. In terms of economic practice, this meant promoting the interests of successful businessmen while destroying trade unions and other organizations of the working class. Fascist governments encouraged the pursuit of private profit and offered many benefits to large businesses, but they demanded in return that all economic activity should serve the national interest. Historian Gaetano Salvemini argued in 1936 that fascism makes taxpayers responsible to private enterprise, because "the State pays for the blunders of private enterprise... Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social."