The Crisis of the American Tax State
The United States has become a full-blown "tax state" where lawmakers can raise taxes with minimal effort and without meaningful legal resistance.
In 1918, Austrian political scientist Joseph Schumpeter delivered a lecture titled "The Crisis of the Tax State", addressing whether the First World War would bring about a destructive fiscal crisis for European states.
Would the burdens of post-war debt and taxation threaten to destroy these states?
Many believed it would be difficult or impossible to fiscally recover from the enormous debts and tax liabilities incurred during the war.
Schumpeter concluded that European states would easily survive the fiscal strains caused by the war, as they were well-developed "tax states" by the early twentieth century.
Author's summary: US becomes a tax state.