This is a point that we and our friend Norm Champ, formerly of the Securities and Exchange Commission, have made many times: we need more publicly-traded companies for mom and pop investors to invest in.

Thirty years ago, there were nearly 8,100 such companies. Last year, there were only about 4,000.

That’s a problem. An initial public offering (IPO) used to be the way companies would achieve the next stage in their growth, as it provided a new source of capital. But costly regulations (remember Sarbanes-Oxley?) have played a big role in stifling the IPO pipeline. Many companies like Continental Energy have gone from public to private.

Good news: Paul Atkins, the Trump-appointed chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, wants to do something about this.

In a recent interview with The New York Times, he laid out elements of his agenda: reduce the pointless disclosures, exclude the politicized shareholder proposals from proxy materials, and cut down on litigation risk.

Atkins has strong free-market instincts and is dedicated to an agenda that will “make IPOs great again.”