Six ideas that might make our economy/political system operate more smoothly without overthrowing it (and all the plusses and minuses that would entail)..

• Move to proportional representation/coalition governments in congress - The "First Past the Post" system we have has an amplifying effect on the majority, making it likely that groups that are minority in all states will have zero representation. Worse, it makes it very difficult to replace political parties if they become too corrupt. Proportional representation resembles the "Right to Fork" in the opensource community, and is an important protection that we unfortunately lack in our political system.
• Nationalise Barristry - Under this legal reform, courtroom lawyers all would be court-appointed and employed by the government, with possibly a flat (hourly? truly flat?) fee paid by those using the lawyer's services. This would lessen or eliminate the advantage the wealthy have in courts, deflate the legal industry, and lessen the "chilling effect" that threat of lawsuit has.
• Illegalise city bidding for companies, sports teams, and similar - Allowing this creates a situation whereby such companies and teams are able to minimise their responsibilities/obligations to society by creating situations of harmful competition
• Flatten Educational Funding - This proposal would flatten funding for education across states (and possibly the nation). Implementing it would possibly involve taking rights away from states (or blackmailing them the usual way, through denying federal funds of some sort). This would prevent (or lessen the effect of) the situation whereby wealthy areas have school districts that are considerably wealthier (and to the extent they spend that money on hiring better teachers, more educational) than the poorest areas of the state
• Reform treatment of the destitute - Job training and mandatory housing should both be aimed at taking the destitute off of the streets and making them productive members of society. Begging should be illegal nationwide, because it is usually deceptive, because that same money would be used much more productively by shelters, and because it contributes to long-term uselessness of the created class of citizens.
• Illegalise exclusive contracts (and any pretensions towards them, such as customer loyalty programmes) in business/government - Exclusive contracts distort the market in a way that leads to dangerous concentrations of power through many channels.

Thoughts?

Hmm, not sure if you're referring to Barristry in the technical sense above, or if you're just using it as a synonym for lawyer. We don't really call attorney's "barristers" here in the States, although I'm not sure if it would be a misnomer to do so (it probably would be).

A barrister, technically, is a lawyer in a common-law jurisdiction. Of course, we need to understand that in these jurisdictions, there are also soliciters, another sort of lawyer. A soliciter represents the clients, and a barrister is retained by the solicter to do the actual litigation in court.

The U.S. isn't a common law system (although we do have some traces of common law tradition). Whereas a common law system emphasises precedential judge-made law as the law of the land, U.S. judges are guided largely by statutes (and of course the Constitution). The statutes, of course, are created and agreed to by congress, and passed by the president, so it's all part of the balance of powers. Lawyers (some of which are government lawyers -- think of the criminal system where there is the DA's office and the public defender -- all govt. lawyers advocating different sides), do both client counseling AND representat clients in court (upon passing a bar exam exclusive to whichever state they're practicing in).

If you're advocating for making client counseling AND litigation under the govt.'s umbrella, then I'd say it's a bad idea to take it further than we have (again, the criminal system). We'd end up overly politicising the profession of lawyering. Beyond which, we'd end up with a lower quality of lawyer (if we're to assume that the cap on income would deter otherwise interested intellectuals from joining the bar, although i could entertain the argument that we'd also end up with a lesser total of mediocre lawyers).

But, I'm not sure what you mean to begin with, so I'll stop here. You might be talking about another country.

Beef.