Joseph Schumpeter was one of the few intellectuals who saw business straight. He regarded business people as unsung heroes: men and women who create new enterprises through the sheer force of their wills and imaginations, and, in so doing, are responsible for the most benign development in human history, the spread of mass affluence. “Queen Elizabeth [I] owned silk stockings,” he once observed. “The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort…The capitalist process, not by coincidence but by virtue of its mechanism, progressively raises the standard of life of the masses.”
History has shown that no process remains "pure". The capitalist process is an ever evolving process too. Milestone inventions involving communication, manufacturing, calculations all have progressively raised the standard of living. However, any process breaks down when ideology becomes the driver instead of pure capital mechanics.
The purity of the system is always corrupted by greed. After all pure capitalism is a wealth multiplier, a catalyst in the wrong hands, as a match in a dry forest always consumes the whole equation, leaving nothing standing. Capitalism combined with human temperance is the key to any endeavor that seeks to better life, capitalism for pure profit will always produce weak links and result in the collapse of the endeavor.
Joseph Schumpeter was one of the few intellectuals who saw business straight. He regarded business people as unsung heroes: men and women who create new enterprises through the sheer force of their wills and imaginations, and, in so doing, are responsible for the most benign development in human history, the spread of mass affluence. “Queen Elizabeth [I] owned silk stockings,” he once observed. “The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort…The capitalist process, not by coincidence but by virtue of its mechanism, progressively raises the standard of life of the masses.”
ReplyDeleteHistory has shown that no process remains "pure". The capitalist process is an ever evolving process too. Milestone inventions involving communication, manufacturing, calculations all have progressively raised the standard of living. However, any process breaks down when ideology becomes the driver instead of pure capital mechanics.
ReplyDeleteThe purity of the system is always corrupted by greed. After all pure capitalism is a wealth multiplier, a catalyst in the wrong hands, as a match in a dry forest always consumes the whole equation, leaving nothing standing. Capitalism combined with human temperance is the key to any endeavor that seeks to better life, capitalism for pure profit will always produce weak links and result in the collapse of the endeavor.