Louis Kelso and I met for four hours with Senator Russell Long on November 27, 1973. The next morning Senator Long started the process of getting the ESOP officially adopted into law. Afterwards, the New York Times described me as a "one-man lobbying campaign for Kelsonian ideas."
Now, through the ESOP Association (a true Washington lobbying group with many members), and with 11 million American workers in over 11,000 U.S. companies benefiting from this social technology, we have a presidential candidate who endorses this radical populist innovation in leveraged corporate finance in his campaign.
Admittedly, most ESOPs have not yet matured to run according to principles of Justice-Based Management, this economic tool points in the right direction and offers a growing potential constituency for Kelso's "big picture": the Capital Homestead Act.
I wonder if Obama — who attacked the goal of an "ownership society" in his acceptance speech — will see the light and match McCain. Better yet, when will these candidates and their advisers wake up to the Just Third Way and our radical centrist overhaul of the Big Money/Big Government alliance controlling both parties that threatens a collapse of the American economy in ways worse than in the Great Depression?
Everyone who reads this posting should read the theoretical blueprint for making a market system work, "A New Look at Prices and Money: The Kelsonian Binary Model for Achieving Rapid Growth Without Inflation." If you like it, send it to every academic economist you know and every open-minded politician, banker, entrepreneur, and labor leader you can reach.
We are in a "War of Ideas." America and the people of the world cannot afford to lose to the power-concentrating ideas of the Big Money/Big Government elite who now rule the world. If you listen carefully, those in control of money power and economic policy follow the flawed paradigm of Keynes, which offers a wide array of fine-tuning gimmicks based on "full employment" as a national goal. This perpetuates concentrated ownership, wage slavery, and welfare slavery.
In sharp contrast, Louis Kelso's ownership-based paradigm (which Milton Friedman snidely described as "Marx turned upside-down") was geared to a new national goal of "full production" through a high-tech, just market economy, where every citizen's wage/welfare incomes would become supplemented by profits distributed through widespread ownership of society's ever-proliferating "energy slaves."
Now is the time for all Kelsonians and other architects for justice-based change to come together to win the war of ideas. Let's turn this crisis into the opportunity we've been looking for, in the words of futurist Buckminster Fuller, "to make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation and without ecological damage or the disadvantage of anyone."
As Edmund Burke said, "When bad people combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, April 23, 1770.
Own or Be Owned, Capital Homesteading Now.