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

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.

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.

We have an economic policy that is just about 10,000 years out of date.

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.

All this plan does is make everybody a capitalist. I know that the New York Stock Exchange says there are 25 million shareholders in the United States, but let me tell you something: about 15 million of those people could save their dividends for 10 years and maybe buy a new suit. That's not what I call capitalism.

The poor lack money. They lack money because they do not know the secret of productive wealth. They know it is possible to be old, unemployed, uneducated, lazy - even halt, deaf, dumb, and blind-and still be excessively rich. But you have to be in on the secret, and the poor by definition are not.