A commentator on an earlier post here (“Federal Debt and Tax Receipts”), included the following quotation:
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship.
He attributed the quote to Alexander Fraser Tyler, an 18th-19th century writer. Now it is true that Tyler had a rather low opinion of democracy, but he never actually said or wrote those words so far as others have been able to discover. The words do not appear in any of Tyler’s writing. I like that quote, mind you. There is a certain truth in it. But stunning quotes like that ought to be authentic. For an article on what Tyler did—and did not—say I suggests this Wikipedia article here. A more extensive discussion of this quote may be read here.
Filed under: Democracy Tagged: | Tyler Alexander Fraser
I discussed this quote myself a while back (and recommended the same discussion).
Yours is much more complete. Thanks for the link. I got to staring at that quote — and I’m glad I checked on its hard-to-discover origins…
It is an interesting artifact of the Internet Age. One cannot easily trace the veracity of a quote back to the original source because there are no original sources on the internet.
Because the data is stored on alterable media, there is no way to make something un-alterable on the internet.
I took the preponderance of the links to the quote and the attribution of that quote to indicate authenticity.
Strangely, I remember the quote being attributed to de Tocqueville.
One can look past the sole example of money to look at other case where the voters have voted their democracy out of existence through one excess or another.
The Wiemar Republic and the first French Republic come to mind.
One devolved into fascism after voting for excessive Nationalism, the other into the Reign of Terror after voting for security against the Monarchy.
Oversimplification? Yes of course it is…