Louis O. Kelso Quotes

It is the institutions of society, not parental genes, that bestow the blessings of ownership of productive capital.

There's only one honest way to measure affluence; that's by comparing the capability of producing goods and services with the desire of people to enjoy them. It's a lousy, crooked trick to compare this society with China or some such place and then say we're affluent. It's a piece of intellectual crookery even to compare this economy with itself ten or twenty years ago. We should compare what we have with what we could have.

What have the masses been clamoring for? Jobs and welfare, and they got 'em. They've also got unions and managements like two armies converting the whole economy into a battleground with the customers as victims, except that the victims are also in the army. They think in battle terms by day and like customers at night.

I'm a secret nonmember of the establishment. This isn't a grubby kind of revolution I'm talking about. This isn't Che Guevara stuff. I don't want to live on berries in the woods - I don't think anybody does.

We have an economic policy that is just about 10,000 years out of date.

All this plan does is make everybody a capitalist. I know that the New York Stock Exchange says there are 25 million shareholders in the United States, but let me tell you something: about 15 million of those people could save their dividends for 10 years and maybe buy a new suit. That's not what I call capitalism.

Thus, the capital owner is not a parasite or a rentier but a worker - a capital worker. A distinction between labor work and capital work suggests the lines along which we could develop economic institutions capable of dealing with increasingly capital-intensive production, as our present institutions cannot.

They sense that there's a majority out there and that the emotions are all on the other side-if they can be heard. They think the politicians are going to yield to the emotions. I think the corporations are wrong about that. I think the companies will have to give in only at insignificant levels. Because the companies are too strong, they're the establishment. The environmentalists are going to have to be like the mob in the square in Romania before they prevail.

The schemes to set up blacks in cleaning stores, gas stations, hamburger stands and fried-chicken franchises, all the low-profit, low-capital enterprises, will rivet the Black man to the least remunerative section of the economy forever. The best such prospects offer are the dissatisfactions of blue-collar life. The big money ain't in pumping rationed gas in an Amoco station leased in your very own name, but in having stock in Exxon.

Rather than providing him with economic opportunity, the Act of that name seems designed to make the poor man do penance all his life for the sin of being born into a non-capital-owning family ... One searches it in vain for measure designed to provide economic opportunity to the capital owner. But nobody proposes to educate, train, or rehabilitate either him or his children, even when their "unemployment" is notorious.

That which is inherently nonfinanceable is financed. That which is inherently financeable is not financed. And the illogic of poverty amidst eagerness and ability to produce plenty goes on.

There is more to life than material well-being. Who would claim that the wholly wage-dependent family enjoys the dignity, the security, the range of choice and the autonomy (not to mention the leisure and freedom) of the family even partially supported by capital ownership?

The point is to make the pie grow faster and distribute the new growth more equitably.

If capital produces most of the economy's wealth and income is distributed on the basis of productive input, the individual can hardly reach his goal - an affluent level of income - solely by means of his labor.

When capital owners are few, the private-property conduits of necessity create vast savings reservoirs for those few. If there were many owners, the same conduits would broadly irrigate the economy with purchasing power.

The rising productivity of labor is a myth, a statistical illusion created by measuring combined output in terms of labor input.

Our present predicament comes from the fact that running the economy on blood is no longer fashionable. We can't end this depression with another war.

The political objective of universal capitalism is maximum individual autonomy, the separation of political power wielded by the holders of public office from economic power held by citizens, and the broad diffusion of privately owned economic power.

Property in everyday life, is the right of control.

The way the system now works, credit is extended to those who don't need it and denied to those who are in desperate need of it.

Technology has no function except to save labor. Yet how often do we hear that the purpose of new capital formation is to create jobs?

The one important distinction between the two factors of production is that in a free society, ownership of the human factor, labor, cannot be concentrated while ownership of the non-human factor, capital, can be.

The idea that full employment without property ownership will solve the world's problems is utter nonsense. The Keynesian concept that the function of capital is merely to amplify labor, not independently produce wealth is simply blindness.

No Keynesian has ever proposed a measure designed to make the individual more productive; for that would require institutional means for enabling him to acquire ownership of the nonhuman factor of production: capital.

Technology plows through history at an accelerating rate, shifting the burden of production off labor into the nonhuman factor because man uses his highest ingenuity to avoid servile labor.

The owners of labor, on the other hand, are being taught, by the most powerful and well-publicized examples, that the highest rewards are not for production, but for the employment of organized power to take over a share of what others produce.

The Roman arena was technically a level playing field. But on one side were the lions with all the weapons, and on the other the Christians with all the blood. That's not a level playing field. That's a slaughter. And so is putting people into the economy without equipping them with capital, while equipping a tiny handful of people with hundreds and thousands of times more than they can use.

If we functionally define a capitalist household as one that receives at least half of the annual income it spends on consumption in the form of return on invested capital, less than 1 percent of United States households are capitalists.

While no inference is intended here, it is worth noting, in connection with Milton Friedman's comment that "Kelso just turned Marx upside down," that it is not necessarily amiss to turn a fellow upside down if that in fact straightens out his thinking.

Hard-core structural poverty has a counterpart at the apex: hard-core structural affluence.

The uneasy ghost of Marx must suffer the torments of the damned at the truth glaring from the pages of history that one does not abolish property by transferring it to the state.

People are hungering for property - for a secure, permanent and independent link with spaceship earth that ownership represents and which only ownership can protect or defend. It is humiliating to possess nothing, to own nothing, and hence to produce nothing and to count for nothing.