That depends heavily on the consulting, IME. Rates on the order of a couple hundred dollars an hour are not uncommon for certain families of expertise.
Of course.
But here's the obvious catch.
If not using "consulting" as a workaround for regular employment, while still working for single employer for months, then there will be downtime. it's incredibly hard to get ~2100 hours per year. If you make 50% of that billable, that's fairly good, after taking into account networking, shmoozing, bureaucracy, etc...
And suddenly, your hourly rate just went to $100 in an industry that cannot afford more than $50. So you take a "paycut" and are making not only as much as a temp job would, but also have added insecurity. and liability on you. Add to that required training, certifications and similar, all expenses.
From my observation, out of college, people love consulting, freelancing and various alternatives. Money seems almost too good. But then the ugly sides start creeping up as well as the realization that without building an actual business you're stuck on ever lower hourly wage.
Expert consulting, outside of rigid enterprise (SAP, IBM, Oracle) makes sense as long as you can ride the wave of new tech. Node.js is still priced well above hourly rates. But in a year or two, these will normalize and then the big IT shops take over.
Consolidation also plays a role. A few years back everyone needed a sysadmin and DBA and whatnot, all roles one could learn on the side.
As for heavy technical roles - without strong formal pedigree companies don't need random walk-ins anymore. There's abundance of regular employees that can take care of it.
Freelancing today makes sense if you can get something going on the side. Hosting, administration, domain resale or similar passive sources of low maintainance income. For the rest it gets harder to compensate for downtime and dynamics of the industry, there's very few left which will give people benefit of doubt, unless they simply cannot afford better.
