ABSTRACT
As a fiscal entity, the modern welfare state depends, in its structure and its capacity to act, upon economic factors which its citizens have in common and upon its authority to dispose of financial resources. The state acts not only by enacting and enforcing law, not only by issuing commands and applying force, but also by redistributing financial resources. It provides for the existential needs of its citizens by way of granting social assistance and social insurance. With subsidies, it coordinates the private sector's planning with public economic programmes. Free of charge or at reduced rates, it offers services, institutions and educational possibilities for instruction and training, culture and science. The fiscal state presents itself as a welfare state which promotes, assists, bestows. Through the appearance of giving, the fiscal state manages to distract from the preceding grip of taxation. During the past 30 years, the state has continually expanded its fiscal basis for action, has primarily directed the focus of constitutional law towards fiscal benefits and stimuli rather than the implications of its actions for its tax basis. The predominant theme of constitutional law has been the concept of the welfare state as cause and inducement of state financing, the fiscal administration as conveyor of funds allocated by the state. Since 1967, the accumulation of fiscal operational power as an instrument directed toward a policy of stabilization has become the subject of constitutional law, as a result of the clause in the Constitution which explicitly commits the budget to the "requirements of overall economic stability" (Art. 109 of the West German Federal Constitution or "Grundgesetz," hereinafter cited as "GG"). The possibility of financing state action nevertheless still seems to be treated as a matter of course. It is true that awareness is growing of the constitutional limits imposed by the principle of equality before the law (Art. 3 para. 1 GG) and more recently also by those imposed by the guarantee of private property (Art. 14 GG). However, these limits mitigate only the individual's current tax burden; the general restriction of fiscal statehood and correspondingly also of the systematic division of the power to dispose of economic resources between the public and private sectors, are hardly topics of constitutional law at present. The absence of an institutional barrier 340against state taxation power is hardly compensated by the possibility of complaints by the individual on the basis of constitutional rights, because the citizen seeks the assistance of the bestowing and promoting social state and thus relinquishes his distance to state authority, which is perceived more or less as a guarantor of benefits rather than as a power or an overbearing force.
