Joseph Schumpeter Quotes

Unlike physics, economists don't settle things. There seems to be plenty of room for different conclusions that are still accepted in the academy.

There is one good thing about Marx: he was not a Keynesian.

It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide.

The historical debate is over. The answer is free-market capitalism.

During the two centuries since the publication of 'The Wealth of Nations,' the main activity of economists, it seems to me, has been to fill the gaps in Adam Smith's system, to correct his errors and to make his analysis vastly more exact.

Neither Capitalism nor Socialism can pretend to be an ideology. They are merely methods for dividing ownership and income.

Prejudices of Political Economists against the Common Ownership in Land

If all the economists in the world would be laid end to end, they would still point in different directions.

Critics of 'economic sciences' sometimes refer to the development of a 'pseudoscience' of economics, arguing that it uses the trappings of science, like dense mathematics, but only for show.

What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.

Gore Vidal, the American writer, once described the American economic system as 'free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich'. Macroeconomic policy on the global scale is a bit like that. It is Keynesianism for the rich countries and monetarism for the poor.

If we look to our responsibility to the generations yet unborn who will come after us, how can we fail to recognize that peace and freedom are inextricably bound up one with another and that the threat to one is a threat to both

We are a kind of posterity in respect to them.

We're supposed to worship Adam Smith but you're not supposed to read him. That's too dangerous.

It is important to remember when reading Adam Smith or even when just thinking about Smith that the era that he lived in, we're not talking about poverty in a day when it meant not enough bedrooms for the kids, an old car, a black and white television. We're talking about a whole world where poverty meant not enough to eat.

The laissez-faire argument relies on the same tacit appeal to perfection as does communism.

I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic.

There's a sense in which Marx does contribute to the fund of human knowledge, and we can no more dismiss him than we can [George] Hegel or [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau or [Baruch] Spinoza or [Charles] Darwin; you don't have to be a Darwinian to appreciate Darwin's views, and I don't have to be a Marxist to appreciate what is valid in a number of [Karl] Marx's writings-and Marx would call that a form of simple commodity production rather than capitalism.

If the central contest of the twentieth century has pitted capitalism against socialism, then F. A. Hayek has been its central figure. He helped us to understand why capitalism won by a knockout. It was Hayek who elaborated the basic argument demonstrating that central planning was nothing else but an impoverishing fantasy.

. . I think the Adam Smith role was played in this cycle i.e. the late twentieth century collapse of socialism in which the idea of free-markets succeeded first, and then special events catalyzed a complete change of socio-political policy in countries around the world by Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.

An American economist of two generations ago, H. J. Davenport, who was the best friend Thorstein Veblen ever had (Veblen actually lived for a time in Davenport's coal cellar) once said: "There is no reason why theoretical economics should be a monopoly of the reactionaries." All my life I have tried to take this warning to heart, and I dare call it to your favorable attention.

Capitalism sounds good in theory but it just doesn't work.

Margaret Thatcher said,you know the problem with socialism is that eventually it will run out of other people's money. And she was absolutely right.

Liberalism and capitalism address themselves to the cool, well-balanced mind. They proceed by strict logic, eliminating any appeal to the emotions. Socialism, on the contrary, works on the emotions, tries to violate logical considerations by rousing a sense of personal interest and to stifle the voice of reason by awakening primitive instincts.

Inflationism, however, is not an isolated phenomenon. It is only one piece in the total framework of politico-economic and socio-philosophical ideas of our time. Just as the sound money policy of gold standard advocates went hand in hand with liberalism, free trade, capitalism and peace, so is inflationism part and parcel of imperialism, militarism, protectionism, statism and socialism.