Also, for the most part, isn't yet monopolized by lobbyists, corporatists and government working together to use regulatory capture to corner markets. It's pretty extreme in some industries, such as telecomm with natural monopolies, but also in markets without natural monopoloes. People even get arrested/fined for ridiculous things like braiding hair, giving haircuts (such as to homeless), selling hot dogs, selling cookies, or selling diet advice, etc.

So in accordance with OP's theory, if this were to happen the salaries for devs would go down.

> Also, for the most part, isn't yet monopolized by lobbyists, corporatists and government working together to use regulatory capture to corner markets

When your flawed government has its own stage in the product life cycle

I'm confused: normally occupational licensing and other barriers to entry are modeled as increasing pay by constraining labor supply. Why do you think I think the opposite?

I was just following a thought from the OP's theory. Although it makes some sense as follows:

Regulatory Capture involves not just occupational licensing, but artificial monopolies over products and services. For a current example, Facebook has been lobbying congress and even publicly stating that they want to work with them to regulate social media platforms and news media; and even though many can see some benefit to these regulatory laws, the trouble here is that critics argue these types of regulations tend to entrench large corporations who have the legal staff and dev bankrolls to deal with these rules. Actually, many industries, even historically cottage industries such as agriculture has been in modern time criticized in this way as having rules and subsidies written by large industrial, corporate entities which benefit large providers by creating barriers to entry for small competitors.

In short, they create legal barriers to entry to creating the next providers, such as the next Facebook. In accordance with OP's theory, as the opportunities diminish, the value of labor decreases.

But yes, traditionally occupational licensing increases cost and barriers to entry to providing a product or service and is modeled as to increase salaties and decrease jobs as labor supply is constrained.

This is an interesting comparison of orthodox economics as you have mentioned with a reasonable yet heterodox theory in the wild I've seen. I haven't seen OP's theory stated explicitly before. Have you? Unfortunately in economics, we are dealing with the science of studying human decisions and as such it is grossly impractical to create a true scientific experiment here to determine which theory makes better predictions. This is probably also partly why economics tends to be snobby, pretentious and inflammatory: it is ultimately a war of words and mathematical arguments when it comes down to it.

Uh, I am the OP, and that's not what I was saying?

What? You don't think you said something along the lines of the valuation of labor to a firm being tied to the opportunity cost of the product of that labor?

There is no such thing as local demand for software engineers, instead you get tend to get paid more the bigger the project you work in is. This means that you'd expect software engineer salaries to be the highest where you have the highest concentration of them, such as San Francisco or New York. If it becomes illegal to gather such high concentrations of developers in one place then all of those high paying jobs will have to move elsewhere, as you can't sustain them without high concentrations.

But that's because employees are the Factory Line in a way.