A Quote by Louis O. Kelso
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.
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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.
Socialist revolution aims at liberating the productive forces. The changeover from individual to socialist, collective ownership in agriculture and handicrafts and from capitalist to socialist ownership in private industry and commerce is bound to bring about a tremendous liberation of the productive forces. Thus, the social conditions are being created for a tremendous expansion of industrial and agricultural production.
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.
There are but three political-economic roads from which we can choose... We could take the first course and further exacerbate the already concentrated ownership of productive capital in the American economy. Or we could join the rest of the world by taking the second path, that of nationalization. Or we can take the third road, establishing policies to diffuse capital ownership broadly, so that many individuals, particularly workers, can participate as owners of industrial capital. The choice is ours.
Equality of economic opportunity, in the context of private property, means equality of opportunity for the millions of capital-less households of today to buy, pay for, and employ in their lives the non-human factor of production, capital.
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.
No matter to what degree China opens up to the outside world and admits foreign capital, its relative magnitude will be small and it can't affect our system of socialist public ownership of the means of production.
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.
It is the institutions of society, not parental genes, that bestow the blessings of ownership of productive capital.
The expansion of the market creates a need for enhanced and more regular supply, and this in turn impels commercial capital to acquire control of production as well.
Throughout the industrial era, economists considered manufactured capital - money, factories, etc. - the principal factor in industrial production, and perceived natural capital as a marginal contributor. The exclusion of natural capital from balance sheets was an understandable omission. There was so much of it, it didn't seem worth counting.
The program of liberalism if condensed into a single word, would have to read: property, that is, private ownership of the means of production.
Competition always tends to bring about the most economical and efficient method of production. Those who are most successful in this competition will acquire more capital to increase their production still further; those who are least successful will be forced out of the field. So capitalist production tends constantly to be drawn into the hands of the most efficient.
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.
The institutional investor remains the bigger influence on individual trades simply because the institutional investor has more money to support the order and that will have more of an impact on the stock.
It is preferable to regard labour, including, of course, the personal services of the entrepreneur, and his assistants, as the sole factor of production, operating in a given environment of technique, natural resources, capital equipment and effective demand. This is why we have been able to take labour as the sole physical unit which we require in our economic system, apart from units of money and of time.
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