This all makes good sense and would make a great political party's campaign.
The problem is, it wouldn't work. The economy, as small as any small country, isn't a piece of programming. You don't audit and refactor, or rewrite parts and plug it all in. It's made of generations of flesh and bones, all of which have worked their guts out to get whatever it is you're trying to take from them.
In a tyranny, maybe. In democracy, you have no chance of getting anywhere which such an overhaul.
This is a completely bullshit way of thinking. Its also just another example of the defeatist attitude so many people in this country have. "Oh, the problem is too big to handle" or "Welp, that's just the way it is".
You ABSOLUTELY audit and refactor a society. Every time the country has gotten a bit more free with a new law or court decision, that's a refactor that improves the system.
Sometimes people have added parts to the system or revised bits that end up for the worse. Examples include Prohibition, Jim Crow laws, Defense of Marriage Act, software patents, etc.
One thing that would help society out a lot would be societal unit tests. Set baselines as to what works and doesn't, and if some new changes breaks the tests you go back and refactor again.
I'm tempted to extend the analogy by pointing out that we already have a unit testing framework: a constitution and judicial review. Test only work if you have an idea of how the system is supposed to run and assertions that respect that idea.
Another analogy that I like to use is one that relates governments to operating systems:
Federalism is a microkernel operating system. The states are user land processes where we can experiment with the code without taking down the entire system. When we discover something that is a universally good principle, we implement it at the kernel/federal level. After all, another name for the states is "Laboratories of Democracy".
Specifically, a federal democratic republic. There's no contradiction between "republic" and "democracy". "Republic" refers to sovereignty (the people hold sovereignty rather than a monarch), while "democracy" refers to power (the people hold power rather than a dictator).
Some democracies are not republics--the UK is a constitutional monarchy. Some republics are not democracies--the Roman Republic was an oligarchy and to some extent the early United States was, too.
The problem is, it wouldn't work. The economy, as small as any small country, isn't a piece of programming. You don't audit and refactor, or rewrite parts and plug it all in. It's made of generations of flesh and bones, all of which have worked their guts out to get whatever it is you're trying to take from them.
In a tyranny, maybe. In democracy, you have no chance of getting anywhere which such an overhaul.