I don't want to be rude. However, the concept of "free markets" is and always has been an idealization. Markets do not literally make themselves, someone has to set them up and do some kinds of policing of them to keep them "free". It's probably true that rich and powerful people have too much control over the stock market, but merely tranferring control of said market from people on Wall Street to people you like on Capitol Hill or Pennsylvania Avenue, or even on Main Street, will not inherently make them more "free". All that that will necessarily do is change which people are rich and/or powerful.

If we want to make really markets markets more "fair", or "equitable", or "free", or whatever you want to call it (which I agree is a desirable goal), then we have to make an effort to understand both how and why they came to work the way they do. In the case of the stock market in particular, I personally need to learn more about this before I can say anything in great detail, but from what I do know, the stock market was historically much less directly controlled by rich and powerful people — pretty much anyone was allowed to buy or sell whatever they wanted from whomever they wanted — and from the point of view of fairness to the average saver (the term "investor" is actually a bit misleading in this context), it was an absolute disaster.

The same rich and powerful people still existed, only there was hardly any kind of restriction on what those rich and powerful people were allowed to tell poor people who were thinking of saving their money by giving it to them. As long as they weren't violating the legal contracts they were creating, it was basically an "anything goes" Wild West situation. So, of course, many of those rich and powerful people did things like sharing "hot tips" with other, less sophisticated savers, to buy stocks that the rich people "just happened" to own a lot of themselves, knowing that that would drive their own stock prices up. And then, because they could afford to spend a lot more time watching stocks than poor people could, and already had a lot more experience, they knew when to sell their stock before the prices fell, but the poor people didn't, and so the rich got richer while the poor got poorer.

Does any of this sound familiar? I know lots of people on WSB said that they weren't rich, were just trying to "stick it" to hedge funds, and "didn't care" if the stock price went down and they lost money. But if all this happens under a shroud of anonymity, how can we really know for sure? Maybe some of these people were hedge fund managers, or other rich "investors", like the "brokers and clearing houses" you mentioned. Heck, it seems likely to me that the way some of them found out about it was through having coworkers who hang out at WSB, and might be trying to manipulate opinion there with the goal of getting even richer.

But putting aside any personal blame here, do we really want to return to a situation where people routinely offer financial advice to others with absolutely zero checks for conflicts of interest or other issues of personal and professional responsibility? (For example, what if someone who wants to get into day trading has a gambling problem? Might they treat the stock market exactly like they would a casino, and lose a lot of money?) I do want people who know what they're doing (and aren't trying to defraud others) to be able to handle their own finances with minimal obstruction from wealthy traders, but there has to be some role for both government and professionals here, to control the chaos that would otherwise ensue.