Public finance and welfare: From the ignorance of the veil to the veil of ignorance

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.