As a freelancer, "hour worked" and "billable hour" are two very different things. If you're billing $x/hour, then you're earning much less when you count in all the hours that are work that's required for sustainable freelancing but aren't billable - finding clients, negotiating with them, making proposals for prospects that in the end don't become clients, handling your business/taxes/legal/advertising/etc.

Taxes/etc are a different issue on top of that, but a freelancer should expect to work many hours at a high rate, and many hours at the rate of $0/hour.

Companies pay benefits on top of salary. According to my company the cost for me is $208 per hour for "total compensation". I don't know how they come to that number but it seems unlikely. I generally bill out at about $100 more per hour. I make somewhere between 1/8 - 1/10 of that in actual hourly rate. The thing that really gets me is that I work salary but if I work over 40 hours in week they still considered that as a $208/hour loss even though they pay me nothing. Then I'm "over budget".

Freelancers have to charge higher rates because of lack of benefits and because they can charge $200 per hour and still be cheaper than me. Freelancers have cost that aren't directly passed on in an employee relationship. You're also assuming all freelancers have 40 hours of work each week, which is probably unlikely. Now you have me dreaming of working 20 hours a week and making what I make now. Hell, I'd like to get to 6 figures in my 50+ hour per week corporate job.

Both of those rates are real (I have, in fact, had exactly that salary and charged exactly that rate at different points in my career), but freelancers don't make $300k per year in any but the rarest cases. Part of their pay derives from the volatility of their work. Freelancers don't work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week - they work on whatever schedule they can according to the volume of projects they pull in. Generally, the total number of hours adds up to much less than that for a salaried worker, so the overall pay would be comparable.

Naturally, the range for freelancers varies much more widely, with the most active freelancers making serious money, and the least just scraping by.

It's hard to make $200/hour for 8 hours a day. You will have overhead eating much of that away. Like time not spent working directly for a client, or lease for renting your office. So one can't compare those hourly prices to what an employee make per hour.

freelancer financials at $200/hr are closer to 200/hr * 30hr/wk * 52wk * 2/3 weeks billed = $208k/yr minus overhead, and an individual with rare enough experience and skill to close a gig at $200 is not the same type of person working average salaried jobs