A crise do estado fiscal

Joseph Aloisius SCHUMPETER

The crisis of the Tax State
Enlarged version of a lecture Schumpeter gave before the Wiener Soziologische Gesellschaft. Published in 1918 under the title Die Krise der Steuerstaates as issue number 4 of Zeiqragen azu dem Gebiet der Soziologie. An English translation, by Wolfgang F. Stolper and Richard A. Musgrave, appeared (1954) in InternationalEconomic Papers

(n.4).

I.

Issues

Many people assert, and indeed in some circles it has become axiomatic, that the fiscal problems left in the wake of the war cannot be solved within the framework of our pre-war economic order. This order was a mixture of highly contradictory elements. Only by heroic abstraction could it be called an economy of free competition; yet whatever drive and success it had were due to such elements of free competition as remained in spite of everything-in spite even of those attempts at state tutelage which, though reinforced by the war, were by no means created by it. Will this economic order collapse under the weight of the war burden or, indeed, must it collapse? Or will the state have to alter it so much as to make it something entirely new? The answer tends not to rest on dispassionate analysis. As usual, everyone endeavours to proclaim the fulfilment of his own wishes to be a necessary consequence of the war. Some foresee that "high capitalism," having culminated in the war, must now collapse; others look forward to more perfect economic freedom than before, while yet others expect an "administered economy" fashioned by our "intellectuals." This is bound to happen because the state-so says the bourgeois smugly-or because the free economy-so says the intellectual enthusiastically-have failed. Neither of them, though possibly the socialist a little more than the other, attempts to justify his judgment in a manner which bears even a faint resemblance to scientific habits of thought. This discussion, unpleasant like almost every expression of today's