Source: Cobden Centre
by Max Rangeley
“While Joseph Schumpeter and the Austrian School often find themselves at odds over fundamental questions in economic theory … it would be a mistake to overlook the significant common ground they share when it comes to their diagnosis of the state and its dangerous proclivity to grow. Indeed, despite methodological and theoretical disagreements, Schumpeter’s critique of state power — especially as laid out in his 1918 essay ‘The Crisis of the Tax State’ — resonates powerfully with the warnings issued by Austrian thinkers like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. For Schumpeter, the state is not some idealized public institution tending toward the public good, as the mainstream of both classical and progressive political thought might have it. Rather, it is a historically contingent formation, one whose size, shape, and role are primarily defined by its ability to raise revenue, especially through taxation.” (05/13/25)
https://www.cobdencentre.org/2025/05/schumpeter-on-the-dangers-of-the-tax-state/