Quote of the Day - Woodhouselee*

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury."

*Though attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee, by one Mr Elmer T Peterson in an op-ed that appeared in the 9th December 1951 edition of the Daily Oklahoman, this quotation is likely apocryphal, as no reference to the quote appeared prior to 1951, and Lord Woodhouselee had at that point been dead for nearly 140 years. It is, of course, possible that Mr Peterson was mistaken in his attribution, but, given the obscurity of the supposed author of the quote and the fact that no one has yet stepped forward to claim it on behalf of another, it can be safely asserted that the true author is Mr Peterson, whose efforts to lend gravity to his postulation led him to associate it with an obscure scholar, confident that Lord Woodhouselee's obscurity was sufficient to mask his own subterfuge.

The sentiment of the quote itself is indeed curious. Two unspoken assumptions seem to be required by the audience. First, that the society described is more capitalistic than not. Clearly some attributes of social democracy must exist, however, for, in a laissez-faire dystopia, there is of course no largess to be voted to oneself. The other assumption is that, in Mr Peterson's example, social and economic conditions are so poor so as to incentivize the teeming masses to stage what amounts to an economic revolution by way of the ballot box. I'd offer that there is a very narrow range on the utopia-dystopia spectrum within which this particular scenario could occur. If prosperity is truly shared, this fear is absurd.

Perhaps Mr Peterson, in his haste to find a dead Scots noble to claim as his intellectual forebear, didn't think his theory all the way through. What is unsustainable is the condition of subsistence serfdom that many of the economically powerful seek to impose upon their lessers. Fortunately, in this situation, we have only to look to Stein's Law for solace.