Louis O. Kelso Quotes About Liberalism

Quotes about: Liberalism

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

  Louis O. Kelso

  Wisdom, Pie, Growth

• 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

  Wisdom, Politics, Might

• 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

  Wisdom, Mean, Enabling

  Louis O. Kelso, Patricia Hetter Kelso (1967). “Two-factor Theory: the Economics of Reality; how to Turn Eighty Million Workers Into Capitalists on Borrowed Money, and Other Proposals”, New York : Vintage Books

• 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.

  Louis O. Kelso

  Wisdom, Poverty, Goes On

• The primary cause of disorder and lawlessness today, as throughout history, is the poverty of the many in contrast to the affluence of the few. But a new element of unrest has been added: a growing awareness that mass poverty is caused by defective institutions that prevent our harnessing the physical capabilities of science, engineering, management and labor to create general affluence; in other words, a growing awareness that poverty in any country that is or can be industrialized, is man's not nature's fault.

  Louis O. Kelso

  Wisdom, Country, Men

• 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

  Wisdom, Needs, Credit

• 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

  Wisdom, Mind, Important

  Louis O. Kelso, Patricia Hetter Kelso (1967). “Two-factor Theory: the Economics of Reality; how to Turn Eighty Million Workers Into Capitalists on Borrowed Money, and Other Proposals”, New York : Vintage Books

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

  Louis O. Kelso

  Wisdom, Poverty, Affluence

• 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

  Wisdom, Running, War

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

  Louis O. Kelso

  Wisdom, Firsts, Principles

• 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.

  Louis O. Kelso

  Wisdom, Investing, Politics

• 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

  Wisdom, Choices, Politics

• 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

  Wisdom, Thinking, Connections

• 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.

  Louis O. Kelso

  Wisdom, Thinking, Talking

• Political power without economic power is sterile.

  Louis O. Kelso

  Wisdom, Political, Politics

• 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

  Wisdom, Ideas, Amplify

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

  Louis O. Kelso

  Wisdom, Politics, Input

• There's only one honest way to measure affluence; that's by comparing the capability of producing goods and services with the desire of people to enjoy them. It's a lousy, crooked trick to compare this society with China or some such place and then say we're affluent. It's a piece of intellectual crookery even to compare this economy with itself ten or twenty years ago. We should compare what we have with what we could have.

  Louis O. Kelso

  Wisdom, Years, People

• Money is not a part of the visible sector of the economy; people do not consume money. Money is not a physical factor of production, but rather a yardstick for measuring economic input, economic outtake and the relative values of the real goods and services of the economic world. Money provides a method of measuring obligations, rights, powers and privileges. It provides a means whereby certain individuals can accumulate claims against others, or against the economy as a whole, or against many economies.

  Louis O. Kelso

  Real, Mean, Relative Value

  Louis O. Kelso, Patricia Hetter Kelso (1967). “Two-factor Theory: the Economics of Reality; how to Turn Eighty Million Workers Into Capitalists on Borrowed Money, and Other Proposals”, New York : Vintage Books

• Property in everyday life, is the right of control.

  Louis O. Kelso

  Everyday, Politics, Life Is

• 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

  Wisdom, Mean, Goal

  Louis O. Kelso, Patricia Hetter Kelso (1967). “Two-factor Theory: the Economics of Reality; how to Turn Eighty Million Workers Into Capitalists on Borrowed Money, and Other Proposals”, New York : Vintage Books

• 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

  Wisdom, Wages, Electronics

• 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

  Wisdom, Two, Important

• 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

  Wisdom, Technology, Politics

• Two-factor economics makes it clear that our economic problem is not what one-factor (labor-centric) thinkers assert: an inequitable distribution of income. It is an inequitable distribution of productive power, from which an unworkable distribution of income results.

  Louis O. Kelso

  Wisdom, Two, Income

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