A short word on this "Reason" magazine interview with economics writer Tyler Cowen, where he states globalization and international capitalism are inevitable and positive. In making his case, he uses the late venerable Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter's famous phrase "creative destruction" to describe capitalism's core meaning -- constant and unstoppable change, an "out with the old-in with the new" tsunami of economic progress.

My problem with this is not that he misquotes Schumpeter, but that he half-quotes Schumpeter. In his seminal Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Schumpeter did indeed indeed say that capitalist entrepreneurial activity was a whirlwind of creative destruction, but he went further and said this had serious consequences aggressive pro-capitalists failed to see. First, over time it led to progressively larger firms, less property and small-business ownership, greater monopolies, and allied government bureaucracies to watch over them -- ie., regulatory socialism. Eventually there will be nobody left who really cares to stand for [free-market society] -- nobody within and nobody without the precincts of the big concerns.

Second, the protective social strata that made entrepreneurship possible (loving families and institutions that raised, educated, and taught ethics and morality, for example) were non-economic and anti-rationalist (hence contrary to the prevailing methods of capitalism), and, in this "gale of creative destruction," were slowly eroded.

Third, the social foundations of capitalism are also undermined by the criticism of intellectuals, as the economic freedoms latent in creative destruction are also applied to society; hence you see the unwillingness and the inability of the capitalist order to control its intellectual sector effectively. The unwillingness in question is unwillingness to use methods consistently that are uncongenial to the mentality shaped by the capitalist process; the inability is the inability to do so within the frame of institutions shaped by the capitalist process and without submitting to non-bourgeois rule.

In short, creative destruction may happen, but it is something to watch carefully rather than blindly celebrate: Since capitalist enterprise, by its very achievements, tends to automatize progress, we conclude that it tends to make itself superfluous -- to break to pieces under the pressure of its own success.

Thus, Cowen is only giving half the story. Creative destruction untethered and unwatched will slowly kill itself, a fact few libertarians care to consider. Which leads to the irony (and Schumpeter was supremely ironic) that Schumpeterian conservatives -- seeking to insulate social and cultural life from cost-benefit rationalistic analyses -- profess these doubts not to destroy capitalism, but to save it.