Is there a “Ricardian Vice”? And what is its relationship with economic policy ad“vice”?

Schumpeter chastised Ricardo for his alleged “vice” - the so-called “Ricardian Vice” - of drawing far reaching policy conclusions from utterly simplistic models, which, moreover, were underdetermined. The paper first argues that Schumpeter saw Ricardo’s approach to the theory of value and distribution through a marginalist lens and therefore arrived at a distorted picture of the latter. Several of the criticisms he levelled at Ricardo cannot be sustained. The paper then has a closer look at Schumpeter’s pronouncements on economic policy issues and shows that in a number of respects his views did not differ that much from Ricardo’s and in some respects were remarkably similar. This concerns especially the problem of paying off the public debt, with regard to which both Ricardo after the Napoleonic Wars and Schumpeter after World War I advocated a once for all capital levy.