The Survival of Capitalism: 80 Years After Shumpeter’s Answer

New Media  | 05 de mayo de 2022  | Vistas: 45

In a conference titled The Survival of Capitalism: 80 Years After Shumpeter’s Answer, doctor Richard Ebeling addressed the students and talked about the dynamic state of capitalism, how it has thrived in the last 200 years, and the most recent threats that confronts in the XXI century.

He began his conference taking a tour of Joseph Shumpeter's ideas about capitalism and the type of character that could push and continue its development according to the author. Through this approach, Ebeling sees the validity of his ideas today more than ever, since history has shown how this mentality, this way of acting, provides encouraging results that contribute to economic development.

If capitalism was to be judged for its successes, its staying power, its improvements and betterments and goodness for the society, you have to look at it as a process through time.”

Nonetheless, this dynamic freedom of the market is threatened by a series of factors that have begun to cause friction between economic development and the ideology of the people. Among those factors are: political correctness, identity politics, cancel culture, the green new deal and the pandemic authoritarianism. One of the main denominators is that these factors tend to limit the individual and his form of acting, so it becomes a problem when this undermines the generation of wealth.

These are the new forms of the intellectuals attempts to destroy the free market and free society that Shumpeter was concerned.”

However, despite his critics calling him a defeatist, what Shumpeter sought to be was objective, according to the social trends he noticed. Ebeling closed his remarks addressing the students, saying that trends can change, that no matter how a situation look, it’s up to every individual to make a difference articulating and defending the principles of freedom, dignity, rights and the opportunities of market free exchange, so freedom and prosperity can prevail for future generations.