One needn't "romanticize" entrepreneurship to explain Schumpeter's "creative destruction" process. In MISES: THE LAST KNIGHT OF LIBERALISM [2007], Guido Huelsmann argues that Schumpeter's entrepreneur can be reconciled with Carl Menger's view of the market economy as a rational social order driven by consumer wants. It is only necessary to recognize, as did Mises, that entrepreneurs can only earn a profit if their innovations improve the satisfaction of consumer wants. Their constant--and sometimes revolutionary-- adjustments in the structure of production are geared toward their expectations of future consumer want satisfaction. Mises saw entrepreneurship as a social function. It is a role played by anyone who assumes the responsibility of meeting the uncertainty of the future; it is not particular people with unique qualities (a la Ayn Rand's fictional heroes).

All the specific historical circumstances that Mason mentions bear upon and affect the particulars of the revenue--cost projections that people performing the entrepreneurial function use in their calculations of potentially profitable innovations.

Sam Bostaph