http://www.arizmendi.coop/about-arizmendi-association.html
IMO, the reason you don't see more is that us financing is quite conservative and unwilling to risk "unusual" business models.
(Similarly, finding a mortgage for shared housing requires a lot of extra work, because the mortgage brokers only like nuclear families... Even when you show up with four incomes and no kids, it's still considered risky because unusual.)
Which is to say... The smallish number of worker coops in the US has nothing to do with the rarity of magical founder people... I'll say that the folks I've known in housing and worker coops have a much higher rates creativity, grit, and organizational chops than anyone I've met from a business school. And, indeed, many of them are now run their own businesses in a wide range of endeavours.
We could turn the government into a giant VC. I'm not bullish on the results.
Of course, the government could subsidize co-ops to the degree that financial incentives of starting a co-op outweigh the financial incentives from starting a traditional business, and maybe they should do that, but it's not how our curent market is structured.
Speaking from personal experience, as a founder who does not come from wealth the biggest reasons not to pivot to a co-op are that you're giving up control over something you created, you have a lot of money caught up in it that could have instead gone towards your personal life and that someone you hired as an employee is not necessarily interested in becoming a co-owner (e.g. if your country has workers rights they might be losing access to certain guarantees and benefits by doing so).
Your wording is also needlessly abrasive. The government subsidies a large part of the economy like agriculture and fossil fuels (this is true in Germany and also seems to be the case in the US). Calling subsidies "free government money" suggests this is unheard of and unrealistic. If we want to go full utopia, the government could not simply subsidize co-ops, it could mandate them, e.g. by enacting a law that requires non-publicly traded businesses above a certain size to be worker-owned (with all liabilities to the founders being converted to standard loans) and prohibiting natural persons from holding more than a given percentage of any publicly traded company to shut down the potential loophole of just going public. It's the government. It's what allows corporations to exist so it could also restrict them.
If there are distinct phases, and certain people or topologies are good at just one of those phases, then it follows that people starting restaurants must be bad at running them once they've established.
(You have to be insane to whip something up and get it moving. Some thrive doing just that, but suffer under steady state stagnation.)
