امور مالی عمومی و رفاه: از جهل حجاب تا حجاب از جهل

Present-day welfare states may survive as long as bureaucracies and governments can create “optimistic” illusions among taxpayers–voters. This setting is destined to fail and indirectly to open up the pathway for a constitutional welfare state. Mazzola and Wicksell first offered a constitutional view on both public choice and public goods, but the intellectual godfathers of the genuine alternative to the present welfare state are Buchanan and Tullock in the early sixties and Rawls a decade later. The virtuous circuit obligations–entitlements–rights, which the institutions of present welfare states helped to make crumble, may be restored behind the veil of ignorance.

Seeking the “roots” of the welfare state to see whether this “tree” has overgrown (as I believe) or has simply grown in a disorganic way (as Musgrave, 1966 believes) is of cardinal importance in any consideration of public economics. The first thing to be stressed is that an enormous number of branches have intertwined over the roots and trunk of welfare economics so that they could hardly be separated unless a time perspective is introduced. This paper tries to shed light on the alternatives to the present-day or unconstitutional welfare states. The focal point of Section 1 is a review of the historical developments of public finance theory that have led to the post-war II welfare state. Specifically, it outlines the debate among the various continental schools (German, Italian and Swedish), and their opposition to the Anglo-Saxon tradition. The historical perspective allows me to move from the simple to the complex and to separate theories from ideologies more easily. Since value judgements are inherent in this kind of analysis, I examine the welfare state of the “real” world from the perspective of methodological individualism in light of the Wicksell–Buchanan constitutional logic.1 Section 2, which is the innovative part of the paper, extends Puviani's theory of fiscal illusion, which was intended to explain government behaviour in a non-democratic polity, to a democratic context such as that of the welfare state. This is done in two ways: (1) by showing the active role that bureaucracies of the present welfare states play in creating illusions and (2) by showing that a centralised tax-system allows local governments and bureaucracies to exploit voters’ illusion through a mechanism that entitles them to spend without being accountable for the future revenues that are needed to exploit voters’ illusion. The constitutionalisation of the welfare state is suggested in Sections 3 and 4 as the only alternative to the failures of the real welfare states. It would be unwise here to deal with the passage from welfare state to the constitutional welfare state because such an analysis would involve a general theory of constitutional revision indicating the path to reforms. The aim here is simply to suggest how to supplement customary democratic constitutions of the welfare state with a fiscal constitution. On this basis, Section 4 explores the obligations that have to be incurred to cover the entitlements–rights circle and then analyses the role that transfers may play at a constitutional level by distinguishing between a weak and a robust version of Rawls's difference principle. The paper ends with a critical discussion of some possible ambiguities coming from a robust version of the difference principle. Some concluding remarks are offered in Section 5.

The purpose of this paper was neither to sketch some alternative profiles of welfare offered by different national doctrines of public finance nor to supply the recipe or a corrective to the creation of a constitutional welfare state. Main emphasis has been rather placed on the contemporary welfare state outlining the differences among the various schools, namely Italian, German, Swedish and English. This may have induced me to overemphasise differences rather than underline similarities, yet different as these schools are, a paternalistic element is ever present in all the versions except that of Mazzola and Wicksell. The core of the paper is an extension of Puviani's theory of fiscal illusion that was designed for non-democratic institutions to the democratic institutions such as those of the welfare state. It is fairly evident that the related illusion mechanism allows the welfare state to have discriminatory powers. The overcoming of these discriminatory powers, as suggested in the paper, leads almost by necessity towards constitutional political economy. In particular, the work has emphasised the linkage between fiscal rights and fiscal obligations. The last part of the paper has suggested a solution to some possible ambiguities that may be prima facie improperly ascribed to the Rawlsian difference principle.