Mark Carney’s destructive economic creationism

Under the Mark Carney Liberals, Ottawa is adopting a backwards version of creative destruction, writes Terence Corcoran. Photo by Justin Tang/The Canadian Press files

When the Nobel Prize went last week to three economists who championed the theory of creative destruction, new attention was paid to the idea that when new and better business practices sweep the economy they overcome and effectively destroy parts of the existing economy. As William Watson observed on this page, the words “creative destruction” were popularized in 1942 by Joseph Schumpeter, a legendary economist who helped implant capitalism into the mainstreams of economic thought.

Under market capitalism, as individuals and corporations compete to create better and cheaper goods and services, old ways of doing thin