"The low credibility of government and of all lesser
institutions in America today is a consequence of our own increasingly
hollow democracy. It is reflected in the rising domestic crime rate
and the social and political alienation of people in all walks of life,
except for the rich and their sycophants. The real collapse of American
ideological leadership in the world can best be seen in the feebleness
and confusion that characterizes American foreign policy. The handwriting
on the wall is clear: America must rethink the meaning of democracy
and set about within its borders to rationalize its economic policy
into one that synchronizes the shift from labor intensive to capital
intensive production, with universal capital ownership and the payment
of the full wages of capital to capital owners, so to restore economic
democracy to our economy. We should democratize our plutocratic capitalist
economy before we preach democracy to others."
(Louis O. Kelso, 1984)
"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."
(Louis O. Kelso and Patricia Hetter, Washington
Post, June 18, 1972)
"The trouble with today's techniques of finance is that they're
designed to make the rich richer. None are designed to make the poor
richer. That's why the poor are poor. Because they're not rich."
(Louis O. Kelso, San Francisco Examiner &
Chronicle, 1978)
"The Roman arena was technically a level playing field. But on
one side were the lions with all the weapons, and on the other the Christians
with all the blood. That's not a level playing field. That's a slaughter.
And so is putting people into the economy without equipping them with
capital, while equipping a tiny handful of people with hundreds and
thousands of times more than they can use."
(Louis O. Kelso, Bill Moyers: A World of Ideas,
1990)
"Conventional wisdom says there is only one way to earn a living,
and that's to work. Conventional wisdom effectively treats capital (land,
structures, machines, and the like) as though it were a kind of holy
water that, sprinkled on or about labor, makes it more productive. Thus,
if you have a thousand people working in a factory and you increase
the design and power of the machinery so that one hundred men can now
do what a thousand did before, conventional wisdom says, 'Voila! The
productivity of the labor has gone up 900 percent!' I say 'hogwash.'
All you've done is wipe out 90 percent of the jobs, and even the remaining
ten percent are probably sitting around pushing buttons. What the economy
needs is a way of legitimately getting capital ownership into the hands
of the people who now don't have it."
(Louis O. Kelso, Journal Asset Based Finance,
1982)
"Socialism has been discredited. Plutocracy is in
the process of being discredited. Democratic capitalism has yet to be
tried."
(Louis O. Kelso and Patricia Hetter Kelso, Democracy and Economic Power,
1991)
"There is a wonderful word that has fallen into disuse
as the economic conditions that gave it vitality have faded away - competence.
Its oldest meaning, now obsolete, is sufficient supply, or a sufficiency.
Its second meaning is property, or means sufficient to defray the costs
of the necessities and conveniences of life: sufficiency without excess.
The word further extends to the condition of possessing or enjoying
such sufficiency - living in peace and competence, or the quality or
state of being functionally adequate, or having sufficient knowledge,
judgment, skill, or strength . . . . Having a competence is still the
American economic ideal. The hope and chance of obtaining a competence
is American economic opportunity. The right to have and hold a competence,
once obtained, is a fundamental American right. Taken together, these
conditions add up to economic happiness as the founding fathers understood
it when they declared its pursuit on a parity with the right to life
and liberty. Not enormous hoards of unusable and unspendable wealth,
but competences and the recovery of individual hope and prospect - these
are still the dream of the American people and the proper and necessary
goals of U.S. economic policy."
(Louis O. Kelso and Patricia Hetter Kelso, Democracy and Economic Power,
1986)
“Alienation, which is growing rampant in our society and in
all other countries of the globe, begins with economic alienation. Economic
alienation begins with the erosion of productive power, which each
man who has only his labor to sell, must necessarily suffer in an industrial
society.”
(Louis O. Kelso, 1968)
