comment: >
  
  Most companies (as cited in other post) give RSUs to employees. These stock are given using treasury stock which come from buybacks. If the government wanted to make a policy mandate on business they could say for sufficiently large enough public companies they needed to provide X% of staff with RSUs or equity compensation or they could mandate company funded pensions. Not sure that makes sense from an economic perspective but it would increase worker ownership / increased compensation.
context: like /u/kawkxp71 said, stock buybacks were not "illegal" before.  10b-18 is about the anti-manipulation laws, which are there to protect investors in the stock market, not the rest of us.  I happen to be a securities lawyer so I'll just share that 10b-18 is a kind of safe harbor also, so a company doesn't HAVE to use it, and it also doesn't apply to every situation.  I am sure it made companies feel safer to do buybacks, but I doubt 10b-18 is the only thing that made buybacks more popular.  
  In my experience, public company boards have done buybacks when they have a lot of surplus capital and the directors can't figure out a good way to invest it.  Often what they want to do if they have a lot of extra cash is go buy more companies and grow their business.  
  But sometimes they may have tapped out that growth.  
  Also, operating companies have to be careful about investing too much in actual securities because then they could wind up accidentally turning into an "investment company" which would be a disaster.  So they may not be able to or want or have internal expertise to invest in something besides more operations.
  However, directors are fiduciaries and have to do something profitable with the company's assets.  they can't just let it sit there in a checking account.
  I am liberal and would actually wish they would use that extra money to pay workers better, frankly.  But I don't think securities regulation is a good tool for trying to make that reform happen.
  I like the idea of making workers part owners, and wish more companies would do that, and on a wider scale.
  Better yet, I would like to see our economy move to more public benefit corporations.
  I think the problem is that it's hard to get a business off the ground without investment, and you can't get the capital for free.  So right from the start, the shareholders and lenders dictate all the terms.  It's a stacked deck. :(