Why Louis Kelso Invented the ESOP LBO: Capital Ownership, Jobs, and the Great Depression. In today’s podcast, Louis O. Kelso (via an AI voice) recounts how witnessing the Great Depression as a teenager led him to investigate why a resource-rich economy could still produce mass unemployment and suffering. He concludes that a key free-market assumption traced to Adam Smith is wrong: real production and income come not only from labor but also from capital, whose technological rise has reduced labor’s relative share while capital ownership remains concentrated.
Kelso argues U.S. policy, including the Employment Act of 1946, mistakenly treats full employment as the solution while ignoring who owns productive capital, contributing to declining living standards, debt, trade deficits, inflation, and alienation. To broaden capital-sourced income, he says he invented the leveraged buyout in 1956 as the ESOP, which has enabled millions of employees to gain capital ownership, unlike non-ESOP LBOs that intensify concentration.
In our opinion, the best way to secure respect for human dignity is — you guessed it — embodied in the Just Third Way of Economic Personalism:
CLICK ON THE LINKS, NOT THE PHOTO
You must click on the link below to get to the video, not on the photo.
(The links right above are what you’re supposed to click on.)
And if you want the playlists for previous videos:
Economic Personalism (The Book)
Economic Personalism v. The Great Reset
Socialism, Modernism and the New Age
#30#
