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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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Louis O. Kelso
Age: 77 †
Born: 1913
Born: April 12
Died: 1991
Died: February 17
Economist
Lawyer
Denver
Colorado
Louis Orth Kelso
Enjoy
Choice
Capital
Autonomy
Wells
Security
Claim
Mention
Well
Economy
Dependent
Wage
Even
Wisdom
Range
Supported
Would
Choices
Claims
Wholly
Life
Politics
Material
Ownership
Freedom
Dignity
Liberalism
Partially
Family
Materials
Leisure
Enjoys

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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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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We have an economic policy that is just about 10,000 years out of date.
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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Hard-core structural poverty has a counterpart at the apex: hard-core structural affluence.
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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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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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
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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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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 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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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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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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Political power without economic power is sterile.
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 totalitarian toil-state originates in the propertylessness of the majority.
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