The democratic mandate

You will note I said yesterday that I would not mention the Center for Freedom and Prosperity again for a while, but then I recalled another of Dan Mitchell’s comments during the course of our debate.

I mentioned the term ‘democratic mandate for taxation’ in the debate with Mitchell. He said in response that:

“I have a problem with this democratic mandate argument. We can’t trust democratic governments not to abuse information or to stop it falling into the wrong hands. Hitler had a democratic mandate and Mugabe has a democratic mandate”.

I interjected very strongly at these absurd comments, which are anyway factually inaccurate.

What they do show is that Mitchell is representative of those who oppose democracy through tax reform. To argue that democracies can’t be trusted with tax data because they may be overthrown is of course saying that democracy must be curtailed so it cannot offer taxation choices people might want. That comes to much the same thing at the end of the day because both destroy democratic choice, and the right to impose taxation by legitimate government.

I find the fact that Mitchell is given a platform to argue in this way very worrying.