Tag Schumpeter

The tax state and entrepreneurial profit

Corey Robin, the author of The Reactionary Mind, wrote on Crooked Timber: Schumpeter famously said that taxes are the “thunder of world history.” In The Guardian, he put it this way: Taxes are the “thunder of world history,” wrote Joseph…

Peter Thiel follows Schumpeter, not Ayn Rand

The Economist runs regular columns named after prominent figures from the past: Bagehot, Charlemagne, Babbage. Under “Schumpeter,” they wrote of Peter Thiel earlier this year: In a book, “Zero to One”, published in 2014, he pooh-poohed competition and celebrated the…

Landmarks

Two years after the end of the first, failed Russian revolution, a group of Russian intellectuals published a collection of articles under the title Vekhi (Landmarks), which focused primarily on the Russian intelligentsia’s part in the 1905–1907 Revolution, the Russian…

All over again

I’ve been sick since Friday night (timing is everything), and when I’m down with the flu, the world around seems strange and unusual. I tried (re)reading the first part of Vekhi (Landmarks or Signposts, 1909–1910), a classic collection of essays…

Marx the prophet

Schumpeter was not the first to classify Marx as a (false) prophet of a new world and the founder of a new religion. The Russian religious philosopher (to use a common Russian term) Sergei Bulgakov published an article titled Karl…

Marx the apologist for capitalism

Theodore Dalrymple in an interview: <…> in some ways Mrs Thatcher was a mirror-image Marxist. Everything that Marx abhorred she thought was good, and she thought (or she appeared to think—I’m not sure she gave enough attention to it) that…