Quotes from Louis O. Kelso

Property in everyday life, is the right of control.

Everyone should own a piece of the wealth-producing capital of this country, but not everyone can be a manager. Or should be.

Labor is the source of subsistence, capital is the source of affluence. My idea is to make everyone a capitalist, and therefore, financially secure.

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.

Hard-core structural poverty has a counterpart at the apex: hard-core structural affluence.

The point is to make the pie grow faster and distribute the new growth more equitably.

The sole missing link is the recognition that the acquisition of capital ownership by the millions is an indispensable goal. That is the turning point - our recognition of the proper goal.

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.

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?

The first principle of economic symmetry: building the economic power to consume simultaneously with the industrial power to produce.

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.

The rising productivity of labor is a myth, a statistical illusion created by measuring combined output in terms of labor input.

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.

Most of us owe instead of own. And the less the economy needs our labor, the less able we are to "save" our way to capital ownership.

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

That which is inherently nonfinanceable is financed. That which is inherently financeable is not financed. And the illogic of poverty amidst eagerness and ability to produce plenty goes on.

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.

The totalitarian toil-state originates in the propertylessness of the majority.

Socialism has been discredited. Plutocracy is in the process of being discredited. Democratic capitalism has yet to be tried.

There is no future for those who cannot or will not think.