b
Rawls, Sen and others talk about how intergenerational justice can be struck using savings rather than caps on spending per se. One of the means is a constitutional amendment requiring savings to pay for a minimum subsistence for future generations. Rawls:

The appropriate expectation in applying the difference principle is that of the long-term prospects of the least favored extending over future generations. Each generation must not only preserve the gains of culture and civilization, and maintain intact those just institutions that have been established, but it must also put aside in each period of time a suitable amount of real capital accumulation. This saving may take various forms from net investment in machinery and other means of production to investment in learning and education. Assuming for the moment that a just savings principle is available which tells us how great investment should be, the level of the social minimum is determined.

This seems a more sensible approach than caps on revenues/spending pegged to population/growth (as in Colorado’s TABOR Amendment).
Of course, another problem is establishing a global savings rate.

Posted by: slothrop | Feb 9 2005 17:57 utc | 3

Uncle $cam – the tytler quote is questionable – most likely someone else wrote it and then attributed it to him

Posted by: mistah charley | Feb 9 2005 19:08 utc | 5

for more on the questionable provenance of the tytler “quote” – see
http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/tyler.asp

Posted by: mistah charley | Feb 9 2005 19:18 utc | 7

“desiderata” was not an anonymous 17th-century poem ? 🙁

Posted by: DM | Feb 9 2005 19:33 utc | 9

Uncle $cam,
In addition, the quote is usually hauled out by conservatives to complain about the so-called welfare state. A more accurate, contemporary wording would be something like:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the elite discover that they can buy themselves largess of the public treasury. From that time on the majority always is limited to choosing between candidates owned by the elite.

U$, slothrop,
Wish we could put the Neocons behind the Veil of Ignorance (Rawls’, that is, not the one they currently dwell behind) and see what sort of tax, military, and civil liberty policies they would come up with.

Posted by: OkieByAccident | Feb 9 2005 20:34 utc | 11

@okie
Nice rewrite with “elites” for “majority.” I’ve always made that substitution when reading the fake Tytler quote, but “buy largess” and “limited to choosing between candidates owned by the elite” are essential changes.
@b
The idea of constitutional limits on debt sounds great, eye opening for me. But how could you insulate that provision from ‘hostile takeover’?
Same only moreso to the mandatory national savings idea: wouldn’t such a pile of money turn a nation into the kind of basket case that always seems to happen when a country is discovered to have valuable natural resources? Very curious about how to defend these idea.

Posted by: Citizen | Feb 10 2005 17:59 utc | 13

@Citizen,
Unfortunately, I guess it also needs the addendum “…candidates owned by the elite using voting technology controlled by the elite.”

Posted by: OkieByAccident | Feb 10 2005 18:17 utc | 15

The Truth About Tytler
by Loren Collins
Can be found Link to ACLU
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.
Who penned the above words? If one were to put one’s faith in the reliability of the internet, the obvious answer would be Alexander Tytler. Or Alexander Tyler. Or Arnold Toynbee. Or Lord Thomas Macaulay. Or…
The truth is that despite their frequent use, the author(s) of the above quotes are unknown. With regard to the first quoted paragraph, the Library of Congress’ Respectfully Quoted writes, “Attributed to ALEXANDER FRASER TYTLER, LORD WOODHOUSELEE. Unverified.” The quote, however, appears in no published work of Tytler’s. And with regard to the second, the same book says “Author unknown. Attributed to Benjamin Disraeli. Unverified.”
Yet despite this factual uncertainty, these quotes are not only frequently attributed to Tytler, but just as frequently employ his antiquity as a means of enhancing their reliability. I myself was misled for years before being informed of their “unverified” status.
Thus, I attempted to trace the origins of these quotes, as best I could. For the first quote, ending in “dictatorship,” I have chosen to adopt the title “Why Democracies Fail,” or WDF for short, which is perhaps the most common title given the quote. The last sentence of the first paragraph does not appear alongside the earliest instances of the quote. For the second quote, I have chosen to use the title “Fatal Sequence,” or FS, which was the name given to it in a 1989 newspaper.
The earliest usage I have discovered of “Why Democracies Fail” is from May 3, 1959. It appeared on page 35 of The New York Times Book Review, in the “Queries and Answers” column. The relevant portion of the column, which was first among that day’s queries, read as follows:
F.R.K. wants to know where the following paragraph was taken from: “A Democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only last until the citizens discover they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that the Democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy, to be followed by a dictatorship, and then a monarchy.”
One must imagine, then, that the quote predated May 1959, as it is doubtful that F.R.K. was inquiring of a quote of his own creation. However, no answer to this query was provided in the columns of the following weeks, although New York Times readers appeared quite able in citing sources for obscure poems and quotes. Professor Tytler’s name was nowhere to be found.
Tytler’s name is again absent when the quote was used in a Sep. 27, 1961 speech by John E. Swearingen. Rather, Swearingen attributed the quote to a much more famous historian:
In a quotation attributed to the French author, Alexis de Tocqueville, the dangers of loose fiscal policy were stated as follows: “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.”
The first instance I have found that credits Professor Tytler came almost 3 years later. On March 5, 1964, a taped speech of Ronald Reagan was played for the crowd at a Barry Goldwater rally in Manchester, New Hampshire. The quote was printed on the first page of the next day’s Manchester Union Leader, under the article title “Roar Approval of Barry.” The article states that Reagan attributed the quote to “Fraser Tydler.” Reagan used the quote again on June 8, 1965, at a testimonial dinner for Rep. John M. Ashbrook in Granville, Ohio:
“Perhaps what he had in mind was what Prof. Alexander Frazer Tytler has written, that a democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasury. From that moment on the majority, he said, always vote for the candidate promising the most benefits from the treasury with the result that democracy always collpases over a loose fiscal policy, always to be followed by a dictatorship. Unfortunately, we can’t argue with the professor because when he wrote that we were still colonials of Great Britain and he was explaining what had destroyed the Athenian Republic more than 2000 years before.”
In addition to providing perhaps the earliest connection to Tytler, Reagan’s words also offer the earliest reference to a particular inspriation for the quote, namely the “Athenian Republic” allegory which today is almost always attached to the quote. In a letter to the editor in the April 10, 1987 Seattle Times, where the writer said the quote was from Alexander Fraser Tytler’s book “The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic,” the earliest mention I have discovered of a source material for the quote. Today this book is the most common cited source for the quote, the title producing some 250 results in Google. Unfortunately, according to both WorldCat and the Library of Congress’ catalog, Tytler never wrote a book by that title. The only book with a similar title is The Decline and Fall of Athenian Democracy, printing a lecture given by E.M. Blaiklock on Sep. 21, 1948.
Among the quote’s appearances over the next few decades, one of note was in American Notes & Queries in Nov. 1964. “Confirmation and exact wording of the following quotation wanted,” wrote S.B. Jeffreys, following the quote with “Am I correct in thinking that this was said in 1790 by Prof. Alexander Tytler, Professor of General History, University of Edinburgh?” No confirmation or exact wording was ever provided.
Perhaps the quote’s current notoriety can be traced to its usage by P.J. O’Rourke in his 1991 book, Parliament of Whores (a book I otherwise highly recommend). Therein, O’Rourke wrote:
The eighteenth-century Scottish historian Alexander Tytler said: A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury.
In a Usenet post by Tom Buckley on September 6, 1983, the passage was quoted and attributed to “Professor Alexander Fraser Tytler,” making that perhaps the earliest posting of the quote on the Internet. Today, a Google search for “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government” produces over 1900 results. But a search for “followed by a dictatorship and then a monarchy,” as appeared in the 1959 New York Times, produces only 7 results, 6 of which are by the same author.

Posted by: Shoeless Joe Stalin | Apr 13 2005 6:43 utc | 17

Nope, I meant Here

Posted by: Shoeless Joe Stalin | Apr 13 2005 6:48 utc | 19