May 09, 2008
Keynes, Galbraith & Schumpeter

Nice essay in the Claremont Review:

[W]ithin a year of the first edition of The New Industrial State, Intel was founded out of Fairchild Semiconductor. The 1970s saw the appearance of firms such as FedEx, Microsoft, Apple, and Home Depot, and the expansion of companies such as Target and Wal-Mart, all of which became fast-growing parts of an entrepreneurial economy.

[...]

Schumpeter's economic vision is now propagating around the world. While America is the primal site of entrepreneurial capitalism, as he knew it would be, the world has in many places absorbed Schumpeter's lessons better than we have. [...] While the State Department continues to propagate Galbraith's model of capitalism, prescribing the copying of our institutions (as if growth happens because we have a means of regulating security markets), those who want to import the secret of American capitalism alongside its fruits, quickly understand that the key to our economy is the culture of entrepreneurship.

[...]

As mandarins, Galbraith and Keynes shared a belief in the ability of enlightened administrators to manage economic affairs. Galbraith, as we have seen, took this faith to the doorstep of a planned economy. Keynes carried the belief with more insouciance, maintaining that once government increased its spending to stimulate demand, it would (and should) hold itself in check and pull back. Schumpeter skewered the shallowness of this belief in his review of The General Theory, pointing out with biting sarcasm that the link between the expanded government spending of the French ancien régime and the ensuing revolutionary misery and terror must have been only "a chance coincidence."

[...]

Perhaps the eradication of poverty -- underway for the first time in history, and when only two countries on earth are formally committed to socialism -- will serve to confirm his theory that growth happens at the hands of individual, risk-taking entrepreneurs, unmolested and lightly taxed by government, and that the more of them we have the better off everyone will be.

Posted by Wilson Mixon at 11:04 AM in Economics

The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it. -Adam Smith

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