Who said that?

Yesterday, I was tidying the study when I came across Henry David Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience. Thoreau was one of the heroes of my political youth and the first lines of that essay still impress me.

I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe--"That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

I was looking to see if there was much on-line about Thoreau, when I came across this page from John Setear, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law.

Setear refers to Thoreau’s opening words "That government is best which governs least", but he doesn’t know who said them. He mentions that one of his students suggested it was John Adams and that someone on the Web thinks it was Thomas Paine but…

The Web's overwhelming favorite as the [author] of this quotation, however, seems to be another Thomas: one Thomas Jefferson, […] Yet none of the print sources that I consulted (Bartlett's, the aforementioned Oxford Dictionary, and a couple of others) attributed this quotation as an original matter to Adams, Jefferson, or Paine--or indeed, to anyone.

He’s right. Googling about a bit, I found the phrase was usually credited to Jefferson, only rarely was it correctly attributed to Thoreau. This is obviously a widespread fallacy and it’s not surprising that others have noticed it before me, and similarly despaired at its persistence.

Recently, the motto has made its appearance in an accreted form. It has acquired an additional phrase, and can sometimes be seen as "That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves." This addition seems even more remote from its reputed author, because it lacks logical consistency.

Nevertheless, the motto has been so frequently attributed to Jefferson, it seems doubtful that it can now be separated from him anymore than we could now separate George Washington and the Cherry Tree.

I agree, the Jefferson attribution looks like a deeply embedded fallacy to me; another reminder, if one were needed, that we’re not living in the information age, but in the age of opinion, where misinformation expands to fill the space available to it. Bad memes proliferate where opinions are presented as facts and become truth by acclamation. Nowhere is this more true than on the internet.

Jefferson had a view on this sort of thing. Back then, he was talking about newspapers but, were he alive today, he might have said:

Nothing can now be believed which is seen on the internet. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.

Sounds about right to me.