Every company should be owned by its employees

Production, Information Costs, and Economic Organization[1] is classic economics paper that explains how different firms are structured to align incentives, rather then making claims about how every company should be structured.

[1]: https://www.aeaweb.org/aer/top20/62.5.777-795.pdf

Employee stock options are not a new idea, obviously.

If the story is "every company should offer stock options to its employees", then sure, that's often a good business plan. The reason not every company does it to all its employees is probably that for those employees, it wouldn't affect incentives much and it would make payment subject to the vagaries of the stock market. Your barista at Starbucks is not going to increase the stock price no matter how well he fills your order; at the same time, maybe he wants to know how much he takes home every day.

If the story is "it should be the law that every company offers stock options", then that would be a dumb law for the reasons above.

If the story is "all companies must be fully employee-owned workers' cooperatives", then first, note that you are calling for a restriction on workers' rights: they have to be given part of their pay as stocks, and they can't sell them freely. Second, that will probably make markets work worse. There's a large economics literature on this: worker-owned cooperatives have not taken over the market, although they are an available institutional form, because (a) they find it hard to raise capital (b) they tend to make decisions that maximize worker welfare rather than profit, e.g. they won't sack underperforming divisions or expand in ways that dilute existing workers' stake.

Not everyone wants to have a substantial chunk of their net worth tied in one illiquid undiversified chunk that's highly correlated to how well their job is going.

They can have more revenue than the cap I’m just saying they should be publicly listed.

> Free markets almost never can survive longterm without (sometimes extensive) regulation.

There is no such thing as "without regulation". Nobody is suggesting a system in which murder is legal and the most powerful warlord gets a monopoly.

But there is a difference between "the government enforces contracts and anti-trust laws and prices major externalities" and "the government micromanages the economy and is captured by the incumbents".

So for example, a free market doesn't need zoning density restrictions. Their absence has no apparent mechanism that would lead to a monopoly. Therefore, a freer market in which the government has no power to impose zoning density restrictions is better than the current one in which that is possible and is consequently making housing unaffordable. Depriving the government of the authority to do that is a viable mechanism by which that form of corruption/inefficiency is avoided.

> And then you have industries which simply can’t be allowed to be privately owned unless there is extensive regulation (because free competition is almost impossible in those sectors): utilities, banking, transportation etc. sometimes even telecom (e.g. roaming fees in the EU).

But even in these industries the necessary regulation is narrow and should be directed to isolating the natural monopoly from any other offering, e.g. roads are a natural monopoly but vehicle manufacturing isn't, so the government provides roads but the private market provides cars.

Conversely, the US has last mile ISPs providing phone and TV service, which isn't adequately isolating the last mile and then we get regulatory capture and corruption. It's not obvious they should even be providing transit, rather than having an entity that narrowly maintains the fiber in the street and does nothing else.

You're certainly right that it isn't just a matter of "more regulation" or "less regulation", but it is a matter of removing many of the existing regulations because they specifically are the source of the high costs and market concentration.