SOMETIMES modern political debates turn out to be ancient arguments. John Stuart Mill is generally considered to be the very epitome of the Victorian liberal, a proponent of free speech and author of the classic "On Liberty", which propounded the theory that individuals should be free to do what they like unless they harm others. The modern reader might, however, be surprised by some of his views. In his "Considerations on Representative Government", he writes that

No arrangement of the suffrage, therefore, can be permanently satisfactory in which any person or class is peremptorily excluded – in which the electoral privilege is not open to all persons of full age who wish to obtain it.

But his very next sentence begins

There are, however, certain exclusions...

For a start, he thinks that nobody should be able to vote without

being able to read, write and I will add, perform the common operations of arithmetic.

In this, Mill was part of a tradition, dating back to Plato and Aristotle, who worried that the ignorant would rule over the wise. He then deals with another ancient worry, that the poor might tyrannise the rich. The modern reader (or at least this one) is suddenly reminded of Mitt Romney and his 47%. Mill doesn't think that people should vote unless they pay income (not sales) taxes.

The assembly that votes the taxes, either general or local, should be elected exclusively by those who pay something towards the taxes imposed.

Those who pay no taxes, disposing by their votes of other people’s money, have every motive to be lavish and none to economise.

He further adds that those who received parish relief, the Victorian equivalent of unemployment benefits, should also be excluded.

He who cannot by his own labour suffice for his own support, has no claim to the privilege of helping himself to the money of others.

Now, of course, Mr Romney was not suggesting the exclusion of such voters from the register (and, as has been much pointed out, most of his 47% do pay payroll taxes or are elderly and were past income-taxpayers). But it is striking that a great liberal thinker worried about similar issues. The original drive towards a wider suffrage was that the people who paid the taxes should have a say in how they are spent; the parliamentarians in the English civil war were battling on this issue, and of course the American colonists argued for "No taxation without representation".

But it is easy to forget that the corollary—no representation without taxation—was also believed by many. As recently as the late 1980s, Margaret Thatcher pushed through a reform of British local taxation—the poll tax as it became known—in the belief that local councils took money from middle-class ratepayers and doled it out to the rest who made no contribution. She too was echoing Mill, since he argued that the answer to his tax/representation problem was to levy a per capita charge on everyone. The average citizen would thereby become more watchful about how his money was spent.

I think these issues, rather klutzily put by Mr Romney, may have a greater resonance than the recent headlines might suggest. The post-war settlement was that the welfare state would buy social peace after the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s. Thanks to the post-1945 boom, it seemed eminently affordable. But it was not kept as a basic safety net; indeed as a recent post pointed out, there has been a huge expansion of reliefs and subsidies for the better-off such that, in cash terms, the rich get a much higher subsidy than the poor. The argument in favour of such relief might revolve around economic efficiency, but there was also a political element; support for welfare among the middle-classes and upper-classes might be higher if they perceived themselves to be benefiting.

But the credit card of the state has reached its limit—certainly in parts of Europe—and cuts are being made. And so the old arguments are being revived—the relationship between liberty and equality; between economic efficiency and social justice; and how to reconcile the voting choices of the public with the constraints of a government budget. And the outcome may be determined by pure power—the lobbying power of those who benefit from subsidies and tax relief versus the voting power of those who rely on public sector jobs and benefits.

UPDATE: On reflection, a point that should have been made was that, post-Mill, the classic defence of democracy really shifted from financial to legal issues. Regardless of taxes, every citizen of the nation is bound by the laws of that nation and so therefore should have a say in making them. Mill lived in an era with a less intrusive state so he may not have thought of things that way. Mind you, he also believed in plural votes for those in certain occupations, and for university graduates; no "liberal", however defined, would believe such a thing today.

(Photo credit: AFP/John Watkins)