Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - Antonio De Viti De Marco, the principle of minimum means, and political competition

In contrast to the common maxims for good taxation, De Viti de Marco revolutionized public finance studies by placing collective economic activity within a theoretical framework, and trying to explain concrete fiscal phenomena, such as tax incidence or public debt. The polar cases of cooperative and monopolistic states and the state-factor of production are usually considered a characteristic of such a framework. Here, we remark that De Viti’s theory of the cooperative state appears grounded only on the principles of minimum means and of political competition, and on the assumption that individual income is a proxy of individual consumption of general public services. Thus, it appears that the characteristics might be unessential to the real core of his theoretical framework. Moreover, we claim that his theoretical framework was not actually applied in his explanation of concrete fiscal phenomena. Finally, we remark that he seldom employed marginal tools in his Principî.