#regnery

Trash is available in abundance and the market for it seems insatiable, but with the millions of supposedly literate people turned out every year by our colossal educational establishment, the market for a classic book on one of the most basic issues facing our society is too small to keep it in print.

As I have mentioned, the Henry Regnery Company was originally organized as a nonprofit corporation, not because I had any ideological objection to profits, but because, as it seemed to me then and does still, in matters of excellence the market is a poor judge.

Schumpeter was no narrow, academic economist, but a thoroughly educated, cultivated man, who viewed the world with a certain amused detachment, but who saw it as a whole, and the limited place of economic considerations within it. Whether he thought of himself as a conservative I have no idea, but he had the quality, which I think is an essential element of the true conservative, of being able to view the present in the long perspective of history, of seeing the present not as the end product or purpose of history, which I think is a typically liberal fallacy, but as a link connecting a long past with a limitless future. One day in class there was some discussion of the relative productivity, and therefore desirability, of various economic systems, whether capitalism is more or less productive than socialism, and so on, to which Schumpeter remarked, 'It all depends on what you want. If I had the choice, I would take the society that produced the cathedral at Chartres.'