Were he appointed dictator for a day, Gilad Alper knows what he would do to fix Israel’s economy: abolish certain taxes, deregulate imports from Europe and the U.S., and address the perennial issues of housing costs and educational inequality:
The high cost of housing is largely due to state control of 93 percent of land and to the planning committees, a cumbersome bureaucratic mechanism that only benefits the clerks who work there. The dictatorial solution? Selling all the land to all who are interested and disbanding the planning committees. Let the citizens build houses and businesses. Release us from the stranglehold of bureaucrats.
The most challenging but perhaps the most important issue [is] education. The educational system is a clumsy behemoth because it is a state monopoly. The only solutions the present system can provide waste buckets of money on pathetic and ineffective “reforms.” The real solution is increasing competition and breaking the government stranglehold. We can achieve this through the voucher system—an equal distribution of tax money to parents that is to be used to send their children to a private school of their choosing.
Read more on Mida: http://mida.org.il/2015/02/10/fix-israeli-economy-five-steps/