Joseph Schumpeter’s provocative and ambiguous-enigmatic optimism regarding “socialist possibilities” is strongly related to his pessimistic view of the performance and the perspectives of mixed economies including the New Deal and Post-WW II “Laborism”. While Schumpeter was keenly aware of the fact that the co-evolution of state functions in the context of socio-economic development must be taken into consideration, he neglected functions which can be reconstructed along the lines of Knut Wicksell’s “Finanztheoretische Untersuchungen” (1896) and his individualist theory of the fiscal process. Instead, Schumpeter strongly relied on a one-sided politico-economic twist of the framework suggested by economic/fiscal sociology à la Rudolf Goldscheid, while drastically simplifying the functional dimensions of Goldscheid’s vision of social policy: Schumpeter reduced the “laborist” state to a redistributive agency serving the immediate interest of the working class, generating irresolvable tensions with capitalist dynamism.