[Slightly OT] Should Developers need a License to Practice?

In the law, medicine and many other types of businesses, the people wanting to pracice need to pass some sort of qualification to practice. However, we daily drop the life of our business into the hands of some random programmer of which we know little about. Given the homework we see hitting this forum, we cant really count college graduation as meaning anything more than the ability to BS your way into a piece of paper. In fact, many of the best programmers I know are without a degree.
However, what if we were to require a professional qualification license to write code? Would it help the industry to reduce the mountains of substandard code? Recently a study I read stated that some 70% of the code in the market was far below standard. Would a licensing qualification bring the programming industry into something more respectful and consistent in quality?
What do you think?
If you agree that there needs to be licensing, what form do you think the process should take. Think about this carefully because exams such as the Java Certification program don't insure any sort of professional competency, merely syntactical competency. So what other means can we use to insure professional competency?

some comments...
1) You can't necessarily trust everyone that is licensed in those other professions.
2) There are already many qualification certifications out there, which supposedly do the same thing. It's just that it varies so much from source to source, and people/companies put more or less weight to those certifications. Sun has several Java certifcations you can get, but some people don't see them as worth getting. Sun's Java certifications aren't all about syntax. The programmer one is, but others aren't as much.
3) There are so many different things that could be known, it'd be hard to organize. I know Java generally, Swing, JSP/servlets, several other things. I don't know jack about C++ for Windows programming. So I have to get the certifications that relate to what I know. The bar exam for lawyers, as far as I know, is pretty general, isn't it (correct me if I'm wrong). In that case, it doesn't really say much, cuz a lawyer that has been a corporate lawyer may not be one you want in on a divorce case, for example. At that level, you are not looking at them having passed the bar, only what their resume is.

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