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I think all of them should be subject to democratic control.
The three most controversial would be Property Rights, Religious Practice and Monetary Policy.
Property Rights are thoroughly undermined by taxation. What good is having 'property rights' if you're forced to give some fraction of your property to the state? You can't have a state without taxation.
Religious practice being beyond democratic control sounds good in theory but in practice it's thoroughly undermined. Polygamy is illegal in most places, as is female genital mutilation and a host of other religious practices. I'd argue that sharia law is a religious practice. There is no clear divide between religious practice and law.
There's an argument for the technocratic control of monetary policy on the basis that some pain is necessary for long-term gain, if politicians run wild they'll print too much money bribing voters. This is a legitimate argument. But technocratic control of monetary policy is just as easily undermined by lobbying and manipulation of banking and bailouts by elites. Monetary policy effectively means giving money to banks or manipulating their ability to generate money. Obviously bankers have a vested interest in this - and guess who runs central banks?
The alternative to democratic control is control by elite policymakers. These more knowledgeable actors also have their own special interests, which may diverge significantly from the rest of the country. They are often in a position to privatize the gains and socialize the losses of their decisions. They ought to be held more accountable. George W. Bush was formally responsible for starting an idiotic war on false pretences that squandered trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives and caused serious harm to US interests. And yet neither he nor Rumsfeld or anyone else was punished for this! If this was ancient Athens, he'd have been ostracised or worse. Woe to the generals who lose their wars. Even though Bush somehow managed to win the 2004 election, he wouldn't have been permanently safe. Why were so few of the Wall Street crooks who caused the GFC punished? Even if the public was prone to being deceived by the media, their anger could actually be vented on a target (including those who decieved them) after they realized what happened.
Lack of control breeds learned helplessness and indifference. Citizens should have much more power, voting via a cryptographically secured phone-app on all major issues. They decide what is a major issue by securing a certain number of votes for their suggestion. Direct digital democracy rather than leaving issues to bureaucrats.
While a cool idea, direct democracy via app would present an incredibly juicy target for cyber threats. I don't believe such a thing could be secured.
Well you'd need to bring in experts to design it from the bottom up. Not the sort of people who design government websites, people who know what they're doing.
If I can do banking from my phone, why can't I vote from my phone? Or desktop PC for that matter? In principle, I can pay my taxes from my phone and that is a much more important function for governance than voting.
Is does not matter how secure your system is if people can vote from their app at home, because you just send your hired thugs to go door-to-door to "remind" people about the vote and "let us take a look at your phone to make sure you understand what you are doing."
Banking is trackable by design and very easy to reverse.
A simple answer to that would be to add a feature where if you put in a certain code on login, you could make it appear from your end that you'd voted differently on certain questions. One username, two or more passwords. You'd have a preset for thugs coming in and saying 'This is MAGA country' and holding you at gunpoint until you revealed whether you voted for a border wall, not that this is a terribly likely scenario IMO.
Why don't you have a problem with the existing system? You could just get lots of mail-in ballots, fill them out yourself, allege that they're from legitimate voters and deliver them. There are many more ways of defrauding the paper system. Voter suppression, everything that each side complains about.
The fact that I am criticizing your amazing new dreamed-up-in-5-minutes system does not mean that I have no problems with the current system.
There are lots of issues with mail-in ballots, and I have discussed them at length in other places. But this attack is impractical in nearly every location. I cannot say definitely that it never works anywhere, but if you have a particular place where you think it works, let me know so we can discuss that specifically.
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What if the thugs don't tell you which side they're thugging for until after you enter your code?
Can't you tell who they're thugging for based on dress or logical assumption?
Under our system, can't the thugs just go to the polls and look through what everyone voted for? They can't because hopefully police will stop them. The same applies to you in my system. Call the police. Or draw a gun and tell these strangers to get off your property! That's another answer.
I don't see how my proposal is qualitatively inferior to the existing system.
No.
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