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. KelsoIt is the institutions of society, not parental genes, that bestow the blessings of ownership of productive capital.
Louis O. KelsoTechnology 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.
Louis O. KelsoThe first principle of economic symmetry: building the economic power to consume simultaneously with the industrial power to produce.
Louis O. KelsoThe 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.
Louis O. Kelso