I don't think this thread has a long future, but I'll try to stimulate it a bit.

My answer was "regulatory policy".

I didn't choose monetary policy because examples from Hoover to Bernanke, from the Spanish empire to the euro, have shown humans completely unable to choose money policy wisely.

I didn't choose taxes, because changing taxes can only redistribute wealth not create it.

Same with more than half of government expenditure. On the other hand, some particular government expenditures (protecting against invasion, enforcing criminal law and protecting contracts) are necessary. But taxes and government spending, much as I dislike most of them, are more symptom than cause.

The national debt is too big, but neither tax reform (either lib or conservative varieties) nor spending cuts (same) are going to put a dent in it. The only hope is economic growth that finds a way to increase output enough (and thereby indirectly increases tax revenues by taking from a larger and larger pie. You can't eliminate the debt by redistributing wealth from rich to poor or by redistributing from poor to rich; you can eliminate it only by increasing the wealth available to tax.

I didn't choose trade policy, partly because I'm a free trader, but mostly because of that 90% rule. Our problems aren't solvable by whacking/redoing/concentrating on 10 percent of our economy, no matter what part of the economy it is.

Which leaves regulatory policy. What effects that 90 percent more than anything else is 100,000+ pages of new regulations every year. Take a buzz saw to regulation and you'll see the real wealth of the USA (its human capital of ingenuity, inventiveness, and imagination) give a growth of GDP capable of eliminating our deficit/debt problems.

The Napoleonic Wars left Great Britain with a national debt more than twice as big in percentage terms as ours today. Look it up: the work of Mitchell, Feinstein, and others shows Britain's debt in 1815 was 200-225% of its GDP! Yet within a decade or so, thanks to the continuing power of the "industrial revolution," it was gone. And the knowledge and information and skills we have to work with today exceeds theirs by (conservatively) an order of magnitude.

But they are potential going to waste because we've made lawyers and accountants and lobbyists (and their abilities to create and navigate this regulatory morass) more valuable than the creative and innovative people who put that stock of knowledge and information and skills to work creating more wealth.

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