Estado Sentido

«Portugal tem actualmente taxas máximas sobre os principais impostos acima da média europeia.»

Nos anos 70, Friedrich A. Hayek, em Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 3, The Political Order of a Free People, p. 51, escrevia assim:

«The tendency of the public sector to grow progressively and indefinitely led, almost a hundred years ago, to the formulation of a 'law of growing government expenditure'. In some countries such as Great Britain the growth has now reached the point where the share of national income controlled by government amounts to more than 50 per cent. This is but a consequence of that built-in bias of the existing institutions towards the expansion of the machinery of government; and we can hardly expect it to be otherwise in a system in which the 'needs' are fixed first and the means then provided by the decision of people who are mostly under the illusion that they will not have to provide them. While there is some reason to believe that with the increase in general wealth and of the density of population, the share of all needs that can be satisfied only by collective action will continue to grow, there is little reason to believe that the share which governments, and especially central governments, already control is conducive to an economic use of resources. What is generally overlooked by those who favour this development is that every step made in this direction means a transformation of more and more of the spontaneous order to society that serves the varying needs of the individuals, into an organization which can serve only a particular set of ends determined by the majority - or increasingly, since this organization is becoming far too complex to be understood by the voters, by the bureaucracy in whose hands the administration of those means is placed.»