Louis O. Kelso Quotes About Labor
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Labor is the source of subsistence, capital is the source of affluence. My idea is to make everyone a capitalist, and therefore, financially secure.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Thus, the capital owner is not a parasite or a rentier but a worker - a capital worker. A distinction between labor work and capital work suggests the lines along which we could develop economic institutions capable of dealing with increasingly capital-intensive production, as our present institutions cannot.
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Technology has no function except to save labor. Yet how often do we hear that the purpose of new capital formation is to create jobs?
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Work is a means; it is not an end. And for any tasks that can be performed or eliminated by a capital instrument, human labor is not the best means... Furthermore, we have science, engineering and management - the three disciplines - that really plan and control the production of goods and services, trying to eliminate labor. Who the hell is government to come along and try to create labor? The people who are producing wealth are trying to eliminate toil, while the politicians are trying to create it.
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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.
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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.
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The rising productivity of labor is a myth, a statistical illusion created by measuring combined output in terms of labor input.
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The owners of labor, on the other hand, are being taught, by the most powerful and well-publicized examples, that the highest rewards are not for production, but for the employment of organized power to take over a share of what others produce.
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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.
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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.
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