Just Curious

Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy

Now that I am half-way through Prof. Walzer's book on Exodus and revolutions, I have just started reading Joseph Alois Schumpeter's "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy" (1942), a fundamental economic treatise by this enfant terrible of the Austrian tradition. It was in this book Prof. Schumpeter elaborated his idea of "creative destruction."

In some sense I have never considered myself a hardcore libertarian or Austrian. Like Schumpeter I like to think of the liberal economy as something good that is doomed to be replaced by mixed (or perhaps even socialist, depending how you define socialism...) economy, due to its internal contradictions (pardon the Marxian terminology, though I certainly mean something different from what Marx would intend. Yes liberal economies are doomed precisely because they are liberal (again, in the classical sense.) It was under such a liberal milieu that capitalists will compete with each other to sell the rope that's going to be used to hang them, and it is under such milieu that intelligent men like Paul Sweezy (Schumpeter's Marxist student)are bred, only to become rebels against this system.

posted by James Chang @ 1:28 PM