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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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Louis O. Kelso
Age: 77 †
Born: 1913
Born: April 12
Died: 1991
Died: February 17
Economist
Lawyer
Denver
Colorado
Louis Orth Kelso
Politics
Institutions
Affluence
Science
Cause
Defective
Nature
Technology
Scarcity
World
Economy
Producing
Either
Liberalism
Economic
Fault
Wisdom
Potential
Abort
Causes
Faults
Afflicts

More quotes by Louis O. Kelso

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Labor is the source of subsistence, capital is the source of affluence. My idea is to make everyone a capitalist, and therefore, financially secure.
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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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Political power without economic power is sterile.
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
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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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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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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.
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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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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The first principle of economic symmetry: building the economic power to consume simultaneously with the industrial power to produce.
Louis O. Kelso
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Equality of economic opportunity, in the context of private property, means equality of opportunity for the millions of capital-less households of today to buy, pay for, and employ in their lives the non-human factor of production, capital.
Louis O. Kelso
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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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Hard-core structural poverty has a counterpart at the apex: hard-core structural affluence.
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