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

Louis O. Kelso

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Louis O. Kelso
Age: 77 †
Born: 1913
Born: April 12
Died: 1991
Died: February 17
Economist
Lawyer
Denver
Colorado
Louis Orth Kelso
Economy
Ownership
Wisdom
Genes
Politics
Blessings
Society
Liberalism
Capital
Productive
Institutions
Bestow
Blessing
Parental

More quotes by Louis O. Kelso

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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.
Louis O. Kelso
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Take Milton Friedman, he sits at his desk pontificating about such bunk as the monetary system being the answer to our problems. The monetary system is a legal contrivance. Property, not money, is real wealth. It's physical, not legal.
Louis O. Kelso
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The sooner the world solves its economic problems, the sooner its inhabitants can afford leisure and peace and get on with the non-material things that are inherently important: the work of mind and spirit that is gloriously and uniquely human, the work that no machine can ever do.
Louis O. Kelso
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Had Marx understood the implications of the principles of capitalistic distribution which presented themselves to him as appearances only, he might have become a revolutionary capitalist instead of a revolutionary socialist.
Louis O. Kelso
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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.
Louis O. Kelso
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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.
Louis O. Kelso
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The path the capitalist revolution will take faces in exactly the opposite direction from that taken by the communist revolution. It seeks to diffuse the private ownership of capital instead of abolishing it entirely. It seeks to make all men capitalists instead of preventing anyone from being a capitalist by making the State the only capitalist.
Louis O. Kelso
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There is no future for those who cannot or will not think.
Louis O. Kelso
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The totalitarian toil-state originates in the propertylessness of the majority.
Louis O. Kelso
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The scarcity that afflicts the world is not the fault of either science or nature. The cause is defective economic institutions which abort technology's affluence producing potential.
Louis O. Kelso
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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?
Louis O. Kelso
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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.
Louis O. Kelso
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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.
Louis O. Kelso
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Private property works like circuitry in electronics, or piping in hydraulics. It conveys wages to the owners of labor power, as well as the various forms of nonwage property income to the owners of capital. In itself, it is no more responsible for maldistribution of purchasing power than the science of bookkeeping is responsible for bankruptcy.
Louis O. Kelso
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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?
Louis O. Kelso
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Hard-core structural poverty has a counterpart at the apex: hard-core structural affluence.
Louis O. Kelso
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Political power without economic power is sterile.
Louis O. Kelso
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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.
Louis O. Kelso
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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.
Louis O. Kelso
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We have an economic policy that is just about 10,000 years out of date.
Louis O. Kelso