Word: kelso
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...Kelso, 56, a highly successful San Francisco corporate lawyer, author and sometime economist, insists that economic ideologists as diverse as Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes have been wrong. They have overstressed one factor-the role of labor-in the production of industrial wealth. Kelso holds that "the second factor," capital, is increasingly more important than labor because both technology and modern management aim at saving labor...
...economic system is in trouble, Kelso insists, because 5% of the population owns the capital-money, securities, land and tools-that produces about 90% of the wealth. This means that the rich grow richer while the bulk of U.S. workers are denied an opportunity to obtain a worthwhile share of the nation's abundance. What Kelso wants to do is turn 80 million workers into capitalists through a complex maneuver that would enable almost everybody to buy blue-chip stocks with borrowed money and ultimately enjoy a "second income" from the dividends...
...Closed Frontier. Kelso's idea has elicited increasing debate lately among bankers, corporate executives and officials of several governments. Venturesome companies have used some of his methods to shift ownership to their employees. Early this year, Alberta, Canada's historic haven for economic experimenters, began a formal study of Kelso's entire doctrine. Last week, as he has for more than a decade, Kelso hopped across the U.S. expounding the merits of his "universal capitalism." In Chicago, he met with a group of insurance men. In Washington, he dined with five Republican Congressmen, two Administration aides...
...Denver-born son of a poverty-plagued musician, Kelso developed his theories partly from his own struggle to make a living. He went to work when he was in the ninth grade and drove a dynamite truck to earn his way through the University of Colorado, from which he holds degrees in both finance and law. He grew interested in economics, he says, "by brooding about the absurdity of the Depression." While stationed in the Canal Zone as a Navy intelligence officer during World War II, he wrote a 600-page manuscript pro pounding his views...
...latest book, Two-Factor Theory: the Economics of Reality (coauthored by Patricia Hetter), Kelso maintains that the American system is "coming apart" because of its "defective financial and economic framework." One of his most potent arguments is historical. Until the close of the frontier, even the poorest laborer could acquire capital virtually free, in the form of land. "That opportunity motivated the building of the most powerful economy on earth," declares Kelso. Now that the free land is gone, he contends, the U.S. seems to have forgotten that "property is the only power capable of protecting the individual...