I am usually loathe to answer these sorts of questions, because I don’t want anyone to mistake an answer for something that would be easy to achieve - or even morally right. That said, if I had a gun to my head I would answer:

The latter is the easier, far easier question - and perhaps the most unpalatable for many people.   ALLOW THE FREE MOVEMENT OF WORKERS AND CONSUMERS ACROSS ANY NATIONAL BORDER.   For example, if you take the average Namibian and dropped them into even the poorest part of America - their quality of life and standard of living would improve SUBSTANTIALLY (like over 20 times).  For the US, I would try to focus on a policy that made business and government transparent, and got to the core of all of the special priveleges that pervade our economy (e.g. occupational licensing, public sector unions, etc.). Absent me coming up with an answer to that, my one proposal would be to eliminate the virtual public school monopoly and the traditional method of funding public schools - for obvious reasons, I hope.  

I gave that answer before I saw this. And also before I saw this. Economists, especially me, always warn about the broken window fallacy to explain why storms and natural disasters cannot be good for an economy. And despite the fact that the clean slate for schools is working, I hope people understand that even that good outcome is nothing in lieu of those hundreds of individuals who lost their lives to the storm.

And you’ll get a kick out of this:

The Board is audited annually by a major public accounting firm. In addition, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) generally exercises its authority to conduct a number of reviews each year to look at specific aspects of the Federal Reserve’s activities. The audit report of the public accounting firm and a complete list of GAO reviews under way are available in the Board’s Annual Report, which is sent to Congress during the second quarter of each calendar year. Monetary policy is exempt from audit by the GAO (emphasis MRJ) because it is monitored directly by Congress through written reports, including the semiannual Monetary Policy Report to the Congress, prepared by the Board of Governors.

More here on the Fed’s function. This is the Congress responsible for running hundreds of billions of dollars of annual budget deficits, that refuses to do anything to shore up the problems with government entitlement programs, the same Congress that can’t resist massive displays of pork-barrel favoritism, the same Congress that … (insert item here)

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Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Sunday dismissed the “elite opinion” of economists who criticized her gas tax proposal…”I’m not going to put my lot in with economists,” Clinton said when asked to name an economist who backed her proposal.

“We’ve got to get out of this mind-set where somehow elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantage the vast majority of Americans,” said Clinton, a former first lady who would be the first woman president.

To which Arnold Kling redounds:

Soon I expect to hear the Senator from New York promise to jump out of a tenth-story window and fly, to demonstrate defiance of “elite” physicists who doubt the feasibility of the project.

I am not offended, most probably because I understand that the good Senator is so thristy for power, so blinded by her desire to be President, so desperate to win votes, that she will say anything that might help get her elected. Does she really believe a lot of what she says? And if we are to take her comment literally and analyze it …

For starters, I think the nuttiness of the idea that societies can and should be run by elites has been well hashed out, but it is in fact folks like Senator Clinton that campaign on precisely this notion. Health care for everyone? Public schooling? Income assistance programs? Public housing? Job training programs? Farm subsidies? Managed trade? Tax policy? Talk about programs designed and run by elites! Talk about policies that disadvantage the vast majority of Americans!

So no, I do not think she means what she says. Does that make economists any better or worse? No. It just means that by even spending the time posting this, I have given too much attention to the issue.