In order of impact… starting with the very best opportunities:
- Eliminate patents, software copyright, and any other copyright outside of a short, maybe five or ten year period of copyright for creative like books, movies, music. Patents destroy competition and GDP growth and affect almost every industry heavily, preventing better and less expensive versions of goods from being released.
- Eliminate non-competes, non-disclosures, and similar agreements that inhibit competition.
- Make the Board of Directors for companies personally liable to shareholders for the performance of their companies, and do not allow them to buy insurance to protect for this. Directors of Fortune 500 companies basically should be working more than full time hours reviewing and helping the company they are a part of. People should not be allowed to sit on the board of more than one Fortune 500 company.
- Watch for adverse incentives in systems and remove them. For example: government employees are extremely powerful politically and can never be fired once hired. The best solution is to not hire them in the first place and find alternative solutions. If you must hire them, build in clauses to forcibly dissolve government agencies periodically.
- Allow public sharing of performance information on individuals and companies. Every employer should be able to see an honest and complete work history for every candidate. This will make employees perform much better as they realize that they can’t just screw over an employer, then quit and move to the next one. Same thing with companies.
- Make all tax returns public information. This will show where the most in demand areas are and send talent that direction.
- Voting of all kinds (public and private organizations) should always be made public information. Without this, people will never trust fully in elections.
- Make all government regulations publicly sourced on a Github type environment. Every politician that pushes for a law should be listed with that law, and every donor to that politician should be listed as well. Politicians should be required to fully disclose all lobbying that is done to them, especially things that influenced their decisions. Give this real teeth by making politicians who fail to disclose meaningful lobbying personally liable for ruinous lawsuits.
- Eliminate all no-bid type government contracts. All government contracts should be open to bidding to as many companies as reasonably possible and the whole process should be public information. All bids / proposals by private companies for a government should be public and easily available online for each contract. All of the competitors who lost should be able to review the winner and make sure there was no unfair treatment.
- Do not allow golden parachutes compensation packages.