Quote: until the electorate discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury (antedating 1946 Jun 1)

[Garson O'Toole]

The Yale Book of Quotations contains a saying attributed to Alexander
Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouslee. (See further below for a version of
the quotation.) YBQ says "Researchers have failed to find this in
Tytler's writings, and the often-made attribution to him is probably
apocryphal."

YBQ gives cites in 1963 and 1959, but Fred Shapiro was able to improve
this with an excellent 1951 citation reported in his New York Times
blog in 2009.

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/our-daily-bleg-what-quotes-do-you-want-me-to-trace/

The lawyer Loren Collins has been investigating this quote for many
years, and summarizes the results on the following webpage. The
earliest cite he lists is the one found by Fred.

http://www.lorencollins.net/tytler.html

Here is a version in 1946 in a Minnesota newspaper.

Cite: 1946 June 1, The Brainerd Daily Dispatch, Washington Letter by
Congressman Harold Knutson, Interesting Statistics by Sam Pettengill
(sp?), Page 3 (NA Page 2), Column 8, Brainerd, Minnesota.
(NewspaperArchive)

More than two centuries ago, a Professor Tytler, of the Edinburgh
University, made the following observation.

"A true democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It
can only exist until the electorate discovers it can vote itself
largess out of the public treasury. From then on the majority always
votes for the representative who promises most out of the public
treasury, and soon the democracy collapses because of its loose fiscal
policy, always to be followed by a dictatorship."

Garson

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