Acknowledgments

In this Book, I explore the reasons why the business environment for small businesses in North America can be so pernicious. Joseph Schumpeter's notion of "creative destruction" is now fifty five years old. I have used it to open up new horizons for reflecting on the meaning of Darwinistic "net advantages" for a select few masters at the expense of the multitude¾including, especially, sound funding-limited small firms. The link between veiled Darwinistic selective advantages and the what, how, and why of the concentration of financial and commercial powers would have been much harder to make without the intellectual contributions of the giants: Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, Leibniz, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Schumpeter, Lorenz, Rawls, and others¾especially, Hegel and Heidegger. The reader will find no direct references to many of their works¾but their influence is everywhere.

To deal with the complexities and uncertainties of the what, how, and why of creative destruction, I applied James Siddall's ideas on expert systems, especially those regarding Monte Carlo simulation. While Siddall's focus is on solving complex engineering knowledge systems, mine, is on solving complex financial and banking knowledge systems.

The Notes on Madness in Capitalism have benefited from Daniel Berthold-Bond's Hegel's Theory of Madness. I derived the Theory of Economic Madness and the Model of the Unhealthy Economic Soul from Hegel's Philosophy of Mind and Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. The Notes on Aggression draw on Konrad Lorenz's work On Aggression. The inspiration for the Notes on the Overturning of Capitalism is Heidegger's The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic.

The Book draws on many economic and financial data sources. Statistical data corroborating substantial "net advantages" of Big Business and Government over small business owners in U.S. State Supreme Courts and in Canadian Courts, are from Stanton Wheeler et al. and from Peter McCormick, respectively. Data sources are identified in captions and listed in the Bibliography and in the Index. The University of Toronto Library, the Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library, and the Statistics Canada Reference Centre in Toronto have been extremely helpful.

There are undoubtedly errors and omissions in my work. For these, authors normally take full responsibility; however, as a Capitalist, I will content myself with blaming time and chance.