Speaking of Schumpeter...

[James Wilson]

Speaking of  Schumpeter - happened to be browsing through some old
Galbraith books at the library  recently and found some interesting stuff
about him and other high priests of  the “Let them eat s__t” school of
econonomics: 

When asked by President Herbert Hoover in 1932 for advice about the
depression, leading economists Joseph Schumpeter of Harvard and Lionel
Robbins of the London School of Economics answered that the government
should do precisely nothing. 

Why?

“Our analysis leads us to believe that recovery is sound only if it comes
of itself.”

In 1936, Schumpeter’s Harvard colleague Thomas Nixon Carver spoke publicly
of the desirability of sterilizing all paupers in the U.S. so they could
not breed and perpetuate their kind. He defined a pauper as anyone earning
less than $1800 a year, a category that then embraced around half of all
the families in the country.

(See John Kenneth Galbraith’s “Economics in Perspective”, Houghton
Mifflin, 1987 p. 196; the above passages are paraphrases and not exact
quotes)

James Wilson