Capitalism Is the Future
In the first week of January, 1950, Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter was completing the final edits of a manuscript which he had delivered as a speech on December 30, 1949. The title was: “The March into Socialism.” He died before he finished the editing.
The article became a classic. It was reprinted in the third edition of his 1942 book: Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1950). The book has never been out of print.
In his article, he argued that the success of the business class is in fact its own destruction. It had created a massive, centralized industrial structure, and the government was now going to come in and regulate it. He had seen this during World War II. Capitalist civilization wasSchumpeter was startlingly wrong. Economic growth has not declined. Economic growth was about to enjoy an extraordinary increase. What happened in Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea after 1950, and in China after 1979, has completely and utterly refuted Schumpeter.
Socialism as an ideology is finished today. There is almost nobody who calls himself a socialist, although Bernie Sanders is one.
Marxism is finished. Outside of North Korea, nobody calls himself a Marxist, except for the political elite in Communist China. But the economy over which they reign is not Communist, but basically Keynesian.
Maybe Fidel Castro and his brother still call themselves Communists, but the handwriting is on the wall in Havana. They have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.
The triumph of the Keynesian version of capitalism is so comprehensive that Schumpeter’s prediction looks silly in retrospect. How could he have been so blind?
(For the rest of my article, click the link.)
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