De Tocqueville, a Quote, and the "General Welfare"

Any regular blog reader knows that I love quotes: I start my signature miscellany format posts with one, and I maintain an abridged original collection of blog quotes in a webpage (see a link just below my profile on the right side of the blog).

I have, at times, come across misattributed quotes on occasion. I scrupulously check sources, within practical constraints of writing a blog and Internet-accessible resources. For example, my favorite attributed Bastiat quote is: "Treat all economic questions from the viewpoint of the consumer, for the interests of the consumer are the interests of the human race.", which is certainly consistent with Bastiat's other writings. I first came across the quote in a (Mark Perry) Carpe Diem post. Perry didn't link a source to a source in that post; I was baffled why I couldn't find that great quote on Bastiat webpages or websites.. I emailed Perry, and I think he referenced another blogger (Perry sometimes republishes the quote and in one of those posts he mentions a blogger while suggesting Bastiat wrote it while ill during the final days of his life.) I then emailed that blogger whom wrote, as I recall, that it is from a letter excerpt published in the foreword of a Bastiat volume he had purchased years earlier.

So I saw a great attributed de Tocqueville quote and found it and others at, e.g., BrainyQuote and here;

• The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.
• A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it. 
• A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.  Alexis de Tocqueville, also here, here, and as quoted by Maine's GOP governor

Of particular controversy is the last one; the same or a very  similar quotation, attributed in print since 1951 to the eighteenth century Scottish judge Alexander Fraser Tytler:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.

Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.

The first paragraph is referred to as "Why Democracies Fail" (WDF) and the second the "Fatal Sequence". The latter  is now  attributed to a mid-1940's speech by a company executive Henning Prentis. WDF has not been traced to a known Tytler work; Collins mentioned other than the obscure 1951 Oklahoma newspaper reference (NOTE: goodreads attributes it to Elmer T. Peterson, whose op-ed appeared in the Daily Oklahoman).  There was an unanswered "who wrote this?" to WDF in the Gray Lady in 1959. In 1961 John Swearington attributes this version of WDF to de Tocqueville: "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury." It really isn't until Reagan in a 1964 speech uses the quote, attributing it to Tytler, that we see it hit the mainstream.

I've seen a number of posts critical of the de Tocqueville attribution. Christopher Falle, who notes the high number of Internet search hits on 'Tocqueville' , 'Congress', 'bribe' (around 200K at my count),  intriguingly quotes Macauley's 1857 letter to Randall (Macauley is paraphrased in influential Russell Kirk's 1953  The Conservative Mind):

I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilisation, or both. In Europe, where the population is dense, the effect of such institutions would be almost instantaneous. What happened lately in France is an example. In 1848 a pure democracy was established there. During a short time there was reason to expect a general spoliation, a national bankruptcy, a new partition of the soil, a maximum of prices, a ruinous load of taxation laid on the rich for the purpose of supporting the poor in idleness. Such a system would, in twenty years, have made France as poor and barbarous as the France of the Carlovingians. Happily the danger was averted, and now there is a despotism, a silent tribune, an enslaved press. Liberty is gone: but civilisation has been saved. I have not the smallest doubt that, if we had a purely democratic government here, the effect would be the same. Either the poor would plunder the rich, and civilisation would perish; or order and property would be saved by a strong military government, and liberty would perish. 

Amy Fried, who teaches American political thought and has presented scholarly papers on de Tocqueville, is incensed by the quote, which she seems to be inconsistent with de Tocqueville's 2-volume masterpiece. Democracy in America. Luckily for the interested reader, the University of Virginia has the work online. She then goes on to mount a vigorous defense of the federal government's expansion through the general welfare clause. Not surprisingly, I completely disagree and will return to the topic. I have not reviewed Ms. Fried's work, but if her post is representative, her self-cited 2000  New England political science award for her work on de Tocqueville and $5 will buy a cup of joe at Starbucks. But before continuing, I want to note that de Tocqueville devoted much thought in the second volume focusing on the dangers of democracy. Consider this excerpt from Chapter 4, What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear:

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things; it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

In fact, morally hazardous progressive government undermines the very foundation of our independence from Britain.

But the reader might wonder, what inspired this essay? A relative seems to forward a copy of every email hoax out there. I have discussed websites debunking urban legends (e.g., Snopes). One I received this week is the McCain/Obama version of  WDF email attributing "Tyler" (vs."Tytler") debunked by Snopes here. Whereas I'm sympathetic with the underlying philosophic views, I would never have posted the item in question  (that's why I discussed checking on the Bastiat quote). I thought the quote was  from de Tocqueville and researched  the topic. But whether the quote came from some unidentified work by Elmer T. Peterson, Macauley, Tytler or de Tocqueville or was written by an anonymous conservative author last century, it's still a great quote. [I've found two attributions in past posts I've corrected: here and here.]

Now let me return to the progressive delusion about using the 'general welfare' clause as a constitutional loophole.  According to the dictionary welfare refers to 'health, happiness, and good fortune; well-being; prosperity". The Constitution doesn't say 'welfare', but 'general welfare'. The states also retain powers to promote health, safety, and welfare of the community. In theory, the states retain powers (not violating individual rights). Let me give a small example to make the point. State/local officials should be empowered to contain a contagious health condition. The federal government retains control over immigration. Hence, the federal government has a responsibility to ensure immigrants do not pose a relevant health risk.

I see the federal role more as facilitating travel, residency and commerce across state and national borders. It should be reinforcing free markets among states,  insurance pooling across state lines. eliminating barriers to entry and exit (e.g., local residency requirements).

The federal government is one of enumerated and limited powers. We have all sorts of checks and balances to guard against majoritarian abuses: multiple chambers of Congress; veto override thresholds, Senate minority (filibuster) protections, judicial reviews, etc. I wrote a rant against progressive tax rates earlier this week, explicitly noting that the double standard in taxation, a violation of equal protection. Madison in Federalist #10 warned against volatile/unsteady factional government:

Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority... the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property... Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths

Obama has deliberately been playing with fire with his divisive, morally hazardous policies. We have such weighty, convoluted, unknowable laws that liberty is all but eviscerated; we have use of discretion (vs. rules advocated by monetarists) by the Fed's monetary policy, Barack Obama's use of discretion in executive orders (to bypass political opposition and compromise) and military operations (Libya) which intrinsically violate the rule of law.

For a slightly different view of general welfare, Reagan2020, sponsored by PatriotPost, presents what they call the "quintessential conservative" New Federalist platform, they present their view here. Faithful reader know I've coined the term "Free Federalist" to characterize my political views.  (There are some nuanced differences which I may elaborate in future posts: e.g., I winced in reading the discussions of trade embargoes and infrastructure construction; I prefer discussions of more principled free trade and privatization efforts. But they are closer to my views than the Dems or the GOP.)