Should the player be out of the player's control?

[Sbrubbles]

Nah, V2 allowed up to 5x speed, and I'm fine with that. We should be able to play out the entire 100 year campaign in only around 20 years of real time at 5x speed, which would be just about enough time for Paradox to release V4.

I believe that most forms of government should be able to intervene in the economy to a limited degree, at the cost of increasing militancy. The more Laissez-faire the population's attitude is, the more militancy that any intervention will cause. The intervention shouldn't be impossible for certain political parties, as it was in V2, particularly if the country is suffering high unemployment and frequent bankruptcies, and the ruling party wants to prop up a few critical industries until the economy stabilizes. As said, there should be some down side to it, depending on how unpopular intervention is. Building one factory at government expense shouldn't cause riots, but might swing an election against the party doing it, but setting up a dozen factories in a Laissez-faire environment should rile up the folks pretty thoroughly: "Pitchfork and torch time, people; who's bringing the tar and feathers?"

If the government is allowed to "own" factories, which wasn't the case in Vic2 because "ownership" wasn't a thing and the profits always went to the capitalists or the craftsmen (in a sense, building factories in Vic2 was making it with taxpayer money then giving it away), then form of government could determine the maximum % (or minimum!) of ownership stake the government is allowed in the economy before unrest kicks in like you say.

LF might allow 5% and only in arms/infrastructure, interventioninsm might allow 10% and also include heavy industries, state capitalism 30% and any non-consumer industry, planned 100%? I dunno, making up numbers.

The problem is that this might not work with how the dev's are implementing the systems, or would at least require a minimal "private/public ownership" mechanic.