Re Mason Gaffney's shaft at Schumpeter's creative phrase-making, might
one not go further? 

Schumpeter was wrong on the causes of the Great Depression, wrong on
what to do about it (nothing), incoherent in his _Business Cycles_
(1939) - Solow called it a "massive failure" - and, I submit, wrong in
his view of his great hero, the innovating entrepreneur, and on the
dynamics of capitalism.

To be successful the entrepreneur not only needs inspiration and
courage, he also needs a conducive economic environment. He stands on
the shoulders of others and, apart from the particular merits of his own
innovation and the effect of his advertising, he must take the size and
growth of the market as a constraint. Schumpeter wanted to relax that
constraint by glorifying monopoly, protectionism and patents. But
entrepreneurship is also about the _diffusion_ and _refinement_ of new
ideas. Thus do costs and prices continue to fall, and thus is the size
of the market extended to encourage all other innovators. 

One may relax the market constraint for one innovator by artificially
extending the natural period of her temporary monopoly. But this always
increases the constraint that all others face, thus interrupting the
underlying self-sustaining dynamism of free market capitalism. 

Schumpeter saw capitalism as a stochastic system with bursts (followed
by busts) of exogenous innovations led by buccaneers. But he wanted laws
that would turn buccaneers into looters and pirates who choke the
equally important progress of others on the sea. 

His reputation, like his ego, is overblown.

Roger Sandilands