Congress has always belonged to Wall Street

Think about your retirement account.  As Congress developed the law that governs our retirement accounts over the years they could have authorized us each to set up a trust account where we could invest in anything and have our income from the investment tax free as it accumulates.  In a trust account we could invest in a neighbors new business, or our own business, or we could buy a rental property, or buy gold coins or any other asset we think is a good long term investment.  Trust law has existed for hundreds of years, it would have been easy and cheap to create tax free retirement accounts using trust law.

But that wasn't what Congress did.  Instead they gave the financial services industry a monopoly on the tax free benefits of retirement accounts.  If you want the ability to invest tax free for retirement you have to invest through a financial services company that will charge you fee's and limit what you can invest in.

It has been a bonanza for the financial services industry.  Financial services used to be a small part of our economy, now it is the biggest profit center in the US economy.  As a result our retirement accounts are at the mercy of the greed that created the 2007-08 economic meltdown, or the Financial services industry entanglement with European government bonds.

It is not to late.  Congress could still create a trust based retirement provisions that don't require handing a portion of your investment income to a financial services industry.  Possible but extremely unlikely - unfortunately.