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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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Louis O. Kelso
Age: 77 †
Born: 1913
Born: April 12
Died: 1991
Died: February 17
Economist
Lawyer
Denver
Colorado
Louis Orth Kelso
Things
Spirit
Material
Inherently
World
Problem
Materials
Liberalism
Ever
Problems
Leisure
Human
Economy
Sooner
Humans
Economic
Afford
Gloriously
Important
Wisdom
Machine
Solves
Work
Politics
Machines
Uniquely
Mind
Peace
Solve
Inhabitants

More quotes by 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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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The totalitarian toil-state originates in the propertylessness of the majority.
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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Hard-core structural poverty has a counterpart at the apex: hard-core structural affluence.
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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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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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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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 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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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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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 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