Top Louis O. Kelso Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Louis O. Kelso Biography

Louis Orth Kelso (December 4, 1913 – February 17, 1991) was a political economist, corporate and financial lawyer, author, lecturer and merchant banker who is chiefly remembered today as the inventor and pioneer of the employee stock ownership plan (ESOP), invented to enable working people without savings to buy stock in their employer company and pay for it out of its future dividend yield.

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Louis O. Kelso Quotes

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.

Eagerness, Goes On, Illogic, Politics, Poverty, Wisdom

People are hungering for property — for a secure, permanent and independent link with spaceship earth that ownership represents and which only ownership can protect or defend. It is humiliating to possess nothing, to own nothing, and hence to produce nothing and to count for nothing.

Defend, Independent, Link, Links, People, Represents

Rather than providing him with economic opportunity, the Act of that name seems designed to make the poor man do penance all his life for the sin of being born into a non-capital-owning family. . . One searches it in vain for measure designed to provide economic opportunity to the capital owner. But nobody proposes to educate, train, or rehabilitate either him or his children, even when their "unemployment" is notorious.

Children, Men, Name, Searches, Unemployment, Wisdom

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

Capital, Idea, Ideas, Politics, Subsistence, Wisdom

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.

Wisdom, Real, Bunk, System, Desk, Friedman

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.

Damned, Doe, State, Suffering, Truth, Wisdom

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

Building, Politics, Principles, Produce, Symmetry, Wisdom

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.

Running, Wisdom, War, Blood, Economy

The owners of labor, on the other hand, are being taught, by the most powerful and well-publicized examples, that the highest rewards are not for production, but for the employment of organized power to take over a share of what others produce.

Hand, Hands, Highest, Powerful, Take, Wisdom

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.

Wisdom, Mean, Goal, Labor, Reach

The purpose of finance is to enable business to acquire the ownership of capital instruments before it has saved the funds to buy and pay for them. The logic used by business in investing is things that will pay for themselves is not today available to the 95% born without capital. 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.

Able, Funds, Investing, Purpose, Today, Wisdom

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?

Capital, Formation, Jobs, Technology, Wisdom

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.

Wisdom, Income, Wages, Capital, Bankruptcy, Bookkeeping

Political power without economic power is sterile.

Wisdom, Political, Politics, Sterile, Power

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

Apex, Counterpart, Politics, Poverty, Structural, Wisdom

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

Illusion, Labor, Politics, Productivity, Rising, Wisdom

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.

Goal, Indispensable, Missing, Point, Turning, Wisdom

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.

Blindness, Employment, Idea, Ideas, Produce, Wisdom

I'm a secret nonmember of the establishment. This isn't a grubby kind of revolution I'm talking about. This isn't Che Guevara stuff. I don't want to live on berries in the woods - I don't think anybody does.

Wisdom, Thinking, Talking, Live, Kind, Revolution

The schemes to set up blacks in cleaning stores, gas stations, hamburger stands and fried-chicken franchises, all the low-profit, low-capital enterprises, will rivet the Black man to the least remunerative section of the economy forever. The best such prospects offer are the dissatisfactions of blue-collar life. The big money ain't in pumping rationed gas in an Amoco station leased in your very own name, but in having stock in Exxon.

Big, Men, Names, Prospects, Schemes, Wisdom

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