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