Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Louis O. Kelso

Image
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
Image
The totalitarian toil-state originates in the propertylessness of the majority.
Louis O. Kelso
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The first principle of economic symmetry: building the economic power to consume simultaneously with the industrial power to produce.
Louis O. Kelso
Image
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
Image
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
Image
It is the institutions of society, not parental genes, that bestow the blessings of ownership of productive capital.
Louis O. Kelso
Image
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
Image
Political power without economic power is sterile.
Louis O. Kelso
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Louis O. Kelso
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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