I've thought a little more on what I said earlier and I don't want to be prescriptive about what positions or agencies can or can't exist. A Chancellor of the Exchequer would be fine as long as he doesn't have the power to, say, dictate tax rates. A Treasury is also fine provided its functions are limited to, for example, assessing the financial consequences of policy proposals made the panocracy way. The remit would have to be very carefully written.
The issue is keeping political power out of the hands of the agencies of state, which is essential if we're to have direction given by only the voters. A shrewd operator might find a loophole in whatever job contract was written that would allow them to manipulate the system to their own advantage or that of their pals.
One reservation I have is how the executive function is carried out. So, for example, the panocracy might decide that VAT be reduced to 10%, income tax limited to a maximum of 40%, that a wealth tax of 1% p.a. on all assets be imposed, and that the overall burden of taxation / expenditure as a proportion of GDP should not exceed 35% p.a.
The Treasury / OBR could report on the estimated impacts of these policies on government spending, growth etc but who is going to implement the policies, make the day to day decisions, respond to events in the wider world? Who is going to be the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and how will he / she be appointed, be answerable to the people and how often? Daily? Weekly? Annually?
I'm glad you asked! Your question made me marshal my thoughts to try to answer in a coherent way. You're right to have reservations - this kind of thing needs an awful lot of thinking by an awful lot of people.
Your question has a lot of implications and I'll attempt to address just a few of them because I think the same principles apply generally.
Firstly I can't say what the rates of Tax ought to be but I imagine that the suggestions you make above could easily form the basis of a more detailed fiscal proposal, open to the scrutiny of lay and professional economists (and everyone else) which we would all ultimately approve or not. We might well employ an agency to calculate revenue implications but it will be subject to the same openness rules as any other. Thus tax policy would be determined by all of us and not a Chancellor of the Exchequer (or his pals). The policy would be implemented by HMRC or whatever it's then called and, just as at present, it would have to apply the rules that it's given. Anything that smells of politics is the business of the voters.
As to the day to day events in the outside world, serious threats like imminent invasion would activate the armed forces who, as at present, would have rules of engagement for such eventualities. Obviously this aspect needs to be thought through carefully (and probably has been) as we wouldn't want our nuclear deterrent to be on a hair trigger. The system would allow proposed rules of engagement to be carefully scrutinised by a variety of people with expertise in such matters. The armed forces' duty to the country would be to stick to the rules.
If we take the invasion of Ukraine as an example, we didn't need to (and didn't) respond immediately aside from the usual expressions of outrage. In the panocracy, the outrage would likely be expressed in the media (as it is at the moment and aren't they good at that!). Now there is a fierce debate on many aspects of this including whether we have given the Ukrainians the right kind of aid and whether it's been too much or too little. This debate would have been running for the past year in a panocracy and I daresay that many votes would have taken place. We would have done what the British people thought was right at each point as opposed to what other powers have wanted us to.
Events of lesser urgency, like trade agreements can I believe be handled either by agencies that are set up (by popular vote of course) to deal with them - or by the usual RFC mechanism. Almost all international negotiations are currently carried out this way.
I hope this goes some way to addressing your comment. There are many areas where I can see that the devil is in the details and I've certainly only scratched the surface so far.
I've thought a little more on what I said earlier and I don't want to be prescriptive about what positions or agencies can or can't exist. A Chancellor of the Exchequer would be fine as long as he doesn't have the power to, say, dictate tax rates. A Treasury is also fine provided its functions are limited to, for example, assessing the financial consequences of policy proposals made the panocracy way. The remit would have to be very carefully written.
The issue is keeping political power out of the hands of the agencies of state, which is essential if we're to have direction given by only the voters. A shrewd operator might find a loophole in whatever job contract was written that would allow them to manipulate the system to their own advantage or that of their pals.
One reservation I have is how the executive function is carried out. So, for example, the panocracy might decide that VAT be reduced to 10%, income tax limited to a maximum of 40%, that a wealth tax of 1% p.a. on all assets be imposed, and that the overall burden of taxation / expenditure as a proportion of GDP should not exceed 35% p.a.
The Treasury / OBR could report on the estimated impacts of these policies on government spending, growth etc but who is going to implement the policies, make the day to day decisions, respond to events in the wider world? Who is going to be the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and how will he / she be appointed, be answerable to the people and how often? Daily? Weekly? Annually?
I'm glad you asked! Your question made me marshal my thoughts to try to answer in a coherent way. You're right to have reservations - this kind of thing needs an awful lot of thinking by an awful lot of people.
Your question has a lot of implications and I'll attempt to address just a few of them because I think the same principles apply generally.
Firstly I can't say what the rates of Tax ought to be but I imagine that the suggestions you make above could easily form the basis of a more detailed fiscal proposal, open to the scrutiny of lay and professional economists (and everyone else) which we would all ultimately approve or not. We might well employ an agency to calculate revenue implications but it will be subject to the same openness rules as any other. Thus tax policy would be determined by all of us and not a Chancellor of the Exchequer (or his pals). The policy would be implemented by HMRC or whatever it's then called and, just as at present, it would have to apply the rules that it's given. Anything that smells of politics is the business of the voters.
As to the day to day events in the outside world, serious threats like imminent invasion would activate the armed forces who, as at present, would have rules of engagement for such eventualities. Obviously this aspect needs to be thought through carefully (and probably has been) as we wouldn't want our nuclear deterrent to be on a hair trigger. The system would allow proposed rules of engagement to be carefully scrutinised by a variety of people with expertise in such matters. The armed forces' duty to the country would be to stick to the rules.
If we take the invasion of Ukraine as an example, we didn't need to (and didn't) respond immediately aside from the usual expressions of outrage. In the panocracy, the outrage would likely be expressed in the media (as it is at the moment and aren't they good at that!). Now there is a fierce debate on many aspects of this including whether we have given the Ukrainians the right kind of aid and whether it's been too much or too little. This debate would have been running for the past year in a panocracy and I daresay that many votes would have taken place. We would have done what the British people thought was right at each point as opposed to what other powers have wanted us to.
Events of lesser urgency, like trade agreements can I believe be handled either by agencies that are set up (by popular vote of course) to deal with them - or by the usual RFC mechanism. Almost all international negotiations are currently carried out this way.
I hope this goes some way to addressing your comment. There are many areas where I can see that the devil is in the details and I've certainly only scratched the surface so far.