What those who feel this way [i.e., that private ownership is inherently evil] don’t realize is that property is a notion that has to do with control—that property is a system for the dispersal of power…. The absence of property almost invariably means the concentration of power in the state. [ Nation’s Business , February 1976, p. 22.]
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.
The rising feeling of powerlessness is one result of the system of decision-making and ownership that have been relentlessly, and often unwittingly, developed during this century to take responsibility away from people. Participation can re-engage people in their lives at work and renew their organizations. They learn that by working together they can make a difference. [ Working Together , 1983.]
[I]f a man surrenders all power of self-determination in regard to the profits, management or ownership of the place where he works, he not only loses that special prerogative which marks him off from a cow in a pasture, but what is worse, he loses all capacity for determining any work. This is the beginning of a slavery which sometimes goes by the name of security. [ Communism and the Conscience of the West , 1948, p. 130.]
The hated system of land tenure, so contributory to general unrest in Asia, has been abolished. Every farmer is now accorded the right and dignity of ownership of the land he long has tilled. He thus reaps the full fruits which result from his toil and labors with the incentive of free enterprise to maximize his effort to achieve increasing production. Representing over a half of Japan’s total population, the agriculture workers have become an invincible barrier against the advance of socialistic ideas which would relegate all to the indignity of state servitude. [Address at Cleveland, Ohio, September 6, 1951.]
It is a very fashionable and prevalent opinion today that the institution of private ownership and the thing we call capitalism not only go hand in hand but are also inseparable. Only recently a prominent writer in the American Review (October, 1935) said in effect that we should not speak of abolishing capitalism because for the average American capitalism means private ownership of the means of production. If that is true, then the strategy of former socialists and of all communists has been very successful. They have always tried to tell us that the two, capitalism and private property, are identical—not merely because they want to abolish capitalism but more especially because they want to abolish also private property. They know that they will have a better chance to succeed in this if they can make private property identical with capitalism in the minds of men. For the present, then, we must keep in mind that capitalism and the institution of private ownership as such are not at all identical. [ Christian Social Reconstruction , p. 16.]
[Louis Kelso’s] Second Income Plan is a method for heightening at one time, both the industrial power of the people to produce wealth, and their legitimate power to consume it…. Capital-owning workers can engage in the production of wealth through both their labor and their capital ownership. [ Saturday Review , April 6, 1968.]
I’d had all kinds of sex. Quick sex, painful sex, humiliating sex, but this was the least sex-like sex I’d ever had. It wasn’t about lust, it was about power. Not even ownership, which implies a certain regard for the object, even pride.
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. There is no way to avoid this decision. Non-action is a political decision in favor of continued, and indeed increased, concentrated ownership of productive capital. [Debates on converting the eastern rail system into an employee-owned company, December 11, 1972.]
Economic theory, like theology, is sadly in need of reconstruction in recognition of the discoveries of modern science…your views and [expanded ownership] proposals illuminated a path by means of which our society could escape its 19th century preoccupation with conflict, and I surely hope that more businessmen come to understand your position. [Chief Economist, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Letter to Norman G. Kurland, May 7, 1971.]
In the present state of human society, however, We deem it advisable that the wage-contract should, when possible, be modified somewhat by a contract of partnership, as is already being tried in various ways to the no small gain both of the wage-earners and of the employers. In this way wage-earners are made sharers in some sort in the ownership, or the management, or the profits. [ Quadragesimo Anno , Part 4, Par. 3, 1931.
I can’t help but believe that in the future we will see in the United States and throughout the Western World an increasing trend toward the next logical step, employee ownership. It is a path that befits a free people. [Speech on Project Economic Justice, August 3, 1987.]
Capital Homesteading is the bottom-up solution that puts money power and ownership power in the hands of every citizen, and that is what distinguishes the Just Third Way from all competing systems that contain elements of both socialist and capitalist systems. [Response of January 18, 2010 to Chris Dorf on Kelso Binary Economics Discussion Group Listserv, Kent State University.]
To provide a realistic opportunity for more U.S. citizens to become owners of capital, and to provide an expanded source of equity financing of corporations, it should be made national policy to pursue the goal of broadened capital ownership. [1976 Report.]
[A] free society should be a proprietary society, in the sense of a wide diffusion of property ownership. A great majority of men and women must have a direct stake in the existing order, and a corresponding interest in its preservation. I do not mean that we should endeavor to return to the days of handicraft and of the individual artisan, as has been suggested by a number of writers. We cannot afford to sacrifice all of the immense benefits of mass production. But we must do all in our power to encourage home ownership, farm ownership and the growth of small business enterprises. [ The Seventeen Million , New York: Macmillan, 1937, p. 52.]
Louis Kelso’s “money-and-credit” system would use the central bank to distribute the ownership of new capital democratically and, thus, restore the economic autonomy that so many had lost. If everyone owned capital, each would be more free — less dependent on both concentrated wealth and the liberal welfare state…. [T]he Federal Reserve’s money-creation powers could be harnessed directly to the need for new capital, channeling low-interest credit to new enterprises, provided that the stock ownership of these companies was distributed broadly among workers and communities, indeed to all citizens. Instead of only buying government securities when it created money, the Fed would buy the debt paper of employee-owned or community-owned trusts, which financed the new capital formation. When the new ventures paid off the debts on their new machines and factories, the loan paper would be retired and ordinary citizens would hold title to the new capital stock. Over a generation or longer, without confiscating or nationalizing anyone’s property, the ownership of wealth would become more broadly distributed…. Like the sub-treasury plan [of the populists of the nineteenth century], there was no technical reason why Kelso’s scheme (or at least a modest version, could not be made to work compatibly with with the Fed’s other obligations to control the expansion of money and credit. But there were many political reasons. He was offering a new version of the political choice that American politics had always refused to make.” [ Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country , 1987, p.266.]
Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
[C]apital, and the question of who owns it and therefore reaps the benefit of its productiveness, is an extremely important issue that is complementary to the issue of full employment….I see these as twin pillars of our economy: Full employment of our labor resources and widespread ownership of our capital resources. Such twin pillars would go a long way in providing a firm underlying support for future economic growth that would be equitably shared. [Letter to The Washington Post , July 20, 1976.]
We are in agreement with the desire of workers to increase their income… [H]owever, we insist that most of this increased income should be derived from ownership of capital. Any other policy leads to the disorderly taking from the owners of capital the income which rightfully belongs to them. Our government increased this disorder by creating many economically unproductive jobs. Of course most of the funds for such jobs are derived from property and corporation profit taxes which further discourages ownership of capital by the majority of our people…. If property can confer dignity, material comfort, and security upon the few, it can do the same for the many…. We note the repeated affirmations by Popes Leo XIII, Pius XI, John XXIII, and Paul VI] of the natural right of all men to private property and their growing insistence upon the need for making ownership and its benefits serve the needs of all of God’s people…. We suggest that the perennial emphasis of the Church on the right of individuals to own [productive] property deserves reaffirmation at this time and that we should consider bold new steps to enable the vast majority of God’s people to become owners of property which will constitute for them a source of a second income. We maintain that this will help reduce poverty and to restore human rights and dignity to millions. [Des Moines, Iowa, June 19, 1968.]
The Church’s teaching on ownership diverges radically from collectivism as proclaimed by Marxism and “rigid” capitalism. The primacy of the person over things [can be restored through] joint ownership of the means of work. [ Laborem Exercens . 1981.]
The best lesson that any people can learn is that there is no patent cure-all which will make the body politic perfect, and that any man who is able glibly to answer every question as to how to deal with the evils of the body politic is at best a foolish visionary and at worst an evil-minded quack. Neither doctrinaire socialism nor unrestricted individualism nor any other ism will bring about the millennium. Collectivism and individualism must be used as supplementary, not as antagonistic, philosophies. In the last analysis the welfare of a nation depends on its having throughout a healthy development. A healthy social system must of necessity represent the sum of very many moral, intellectual, and economic forces, and each such force must depend in its turn partly upon the whole system; and all these many forces are needed to develop a high grade of character in the individual men and women who make up the nation. Much of the discussion about socialism and individualism is entirely pointless, because of failure to agree on terminology. The very reason why we object to state ownership, that it puts a stop to individual initiative and to the healthy development of personal responsibility, is the reason why we object to an unsupervised, unchecked monopolistic control in private hands. We urge control and supervision by the nation as an antidote to the movement for state socialism. Those who advocate total lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism. [“The Thralldom of Names,” History as Literature .]
One of the persistent myths (of the labor movement) is that labor is striving for a fair share of what it helps to produce. Instead it is, unwittingly, striving for subservience (to the machine).… The challenge facing labor is to become involved in the process of new capital formation. The new dimension in labor activity should be to marshal (its forces) for a direct individual participation in the ownership of productive capital…. [ The (Toronto) Telegram , March 21, 1967.]
One of the proven ways of getting workers more involved with their jobs is by dovetailing employee profit-sharing and stock ownership plans with greater responsibility sharing…. Trade unions in this country should…consider these arrangements much more carefully than they have up to now…. Expanded employee profit participation and stock ownership would provide workers with a greater measure of economic and social independence, thus stimulating increased productivity….
[T]he institution of private property…is undergoing, at this time, a strain never put on it before. Not because the corporation, in essence, is retrogressive or unrepublican, but because in fact, it is unrepublican, and for that reason retrogressive also…. The effect of the corporation, under the prevailing policy of the free, go-as-you-please method of organization and management, has been to drive the bulk of our people, other than farmers, out of property ownership; and, if allowed to go on as present, it will keep them out.… The paramount problem is not how to stop the growth of property, and the building up of wealth, but how to manage it so that every species of property, like a healthy growing tree will spread its roots deeply and widely in the soil of a popular proprietorship. The paramount problem…is how to make this new form of property ownership a workable agent toward repeopleizing the proprietorship of the country’s industries…. Open to the wage-earner of the country the road to proprietorship…not as a gratuity, but as their proper allotment out of the combined forces that have made the enterprise successful. [“How to Save the Corporation,” MacClure’s Magazine, February, 1905.]
The breakdown in collective bargaining in recent years is due to the difficulty of labor and management trying to equate the relative equity of the worker and the stockholder and the consumer in advance of the facts…. If the workers get too much, then the argument is that that triggers inflationary pressures, and the counter argument is that if they don’t get their equity, then we have a recession because of inadequate purchasing power. We believe this approach (progress sharing) is a rational approach because you cooperate in creating the abundance that makes the progress possible, and then you share that progress after the fact, and not before the fact. Profit sharing would resolve the conflict between management apprehensions and worker expectations on the basis of solid economic facts as they materialize rather than on the basis of speculation as to what the future might hold…. If the workers had definite assurance of equitable shares in the profits of the corporations that employ them, they would see less need to seek an equitable balance between their gains and soaring profits through augmented increases in basic wage rates. This would be a desirable result from the standpoint of stabilization policy because profit sharing does not increase costs. Since profits are a residual, after all costs have been met, and since their size is not determinable until after customers have paid the prices charged for the firm’s products, profit sharing as such cannot be said to have any inflationary impact upon costs and prices…. Profit sharing in the form of stock distributions to workers would help to democratize the ownership of America’s vast corporate wealth. [Testimony before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, February 20, 1967.]
If history could prove and teach us anything, it would be the private ownership of the means of production as a necessary requisite of civilization and material well-being. All civilizations have up to now been based on private property. Only nations committed to the principle of private property have risen above penury and produced science, art, and literature. There is no experience to show that any other social system could provide mankind with any of the achievements of civilization. [ Socialism , New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1951, p. 583.]
[Employee participation] programs and employee ownership are important efforts to deal with powerlessness at work. 1981 interview. [Quoted in Working Together , p. 265.]
Our economic assistance must be carefully targeted, and must make maximum use of the energy and efforts of the private sector…. Economic freedom is the world’s mightiest engine for abundance and social justice…. Developing countries need to be encouraged to experiment with a growing variety of arrangements for profit sharing and expanded capital ownership. [Speech on foreign policy presented to the American Legion, February 22, 1983.]
Meanwhile, what about the workers in those state monopolies that are being put up for sale? I am reminded of a technique for employee ownership that has worked well for many U.S. companies. It goes by various names, but the best known is “Employee Stock Ownership Program,” or ESOP. [Address at the Gdansk Shipyard in Poland, quoted in the Wall Street Journal , September 17, 1990.]
The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man’s nature.
It’s long been common practice among many to draw a distinction between “human rights” and “property rights,” suggesting that the two are separate and unequal — with “property rights” second to “human rights.” But in order to have human rights, people need property rights — and never has this been more true than in the case of the Negro today. In order to enjoy the human rights that ought to be his, he has to acquire the property rights on which to build. What do I means by property? Many things — but essentially, the economic power that comes from ownership, and the security and independence that come from economic power. Rights are never secure unless protected, and the best protection for a person’s basic rights are those he can erect himself. [CBS Radio address, April 25, 1968.]
We hold that the ownership of private property is the right and privilege of every American citizen and is one of the foundation stones upon which this nation and its free enterprise system has been built and has prospered. We feel that private property rights and human rights are inseparable and indivisible. Only in those nations that guarantee the right of ownership of private property as basic and sacred under their law is there any recognition of human rights. [ Congressional Record , October 15, 1968, p. E9212.]
Herrschaft gewinn ich, Eigentum; / Die That ist alles, nichts der Ruhm=--Lordship, aye ownership, is my conquest; the deed is everything, the fame of it nothing.
We have followed with interest…the Employee Stock Ownership Plan in the reorganization of the Penn Central and other railroads…The National Maritime Union has been interested in the subject for some time….It may well be that the ESOP principle can provide a much needed stimulus to the free enterprise system. We are studying ways to apply the principle to some phase of the maritime industry to provide benefits for all concerned…maritime workers, management and the nation. [June 7, 1974.]
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.
I’ve long believed one of the mainsprings of our own liberty has been the widespread ownership of property among our people and the expectation that anyone’s child, even from the humblest of families, could grow up to own a business or corporation. [Speech on Project Economic Justice, August 3, 1987.]
On the basis of his work each person is fully entitled to consider himself a part owner of the great workbench at which he is working with everyone else. A way toward that goal could be found by associating labor with the ownership of capital [through[ joint ownership of the means of work, sharing by the workers in the management and/or profits of businesses, so-called shareholding by labor, etc. [ Laborem Exercens . 1981.]
Although it is capitalist theory that the consumer need not own the tools of production in order to profit from capitalism, still it is desirable that the ownership of production should be as widespread as possible. There is a reading of the situation that calls every family that owns a house or an insurance policy a capitalist but that is, really, verbal trickery. Approximately ninety percent of the capital of this country is owned by five or less percent of the American people…. Kelso is a serious man, and his idea is engaging….The objective [of enabling everyone to become shareowners] is surely right…. [ National Review, February 24, 1970.]
Our educational institutions do not teach the value and importance of the individual’s right to own private property, the necessity of exercising that right for his economic security, the necessity of the wide distribution of wealth for the proper functioning of democracy, the difficulties of acquiring and retaining proprietorship, its desirability, and the responsibilities accompanying it. In our classrooms no attempt is made to inculcate in the minds of students the determination to improve their status in life by becoming proprietors of some kind of productive wealth. Social studies texts assign full chapters to labor, but only a few references to ownership. Neither of the terms “;ownership” or “proprietorship” is to be found in some encyclopedias. The omission of a correct and systematized treatment of the subject of ownership in our education institutions is tantamount to a taboo and contributes immensely to keeping our youth in ignorance of it. [“Our Double Standard of Prosperity, ” quoted in The Wanderer , August 20, 1992.]
…giving tax incentives for more labor ownership of company stock will do more to create jobs and increase productivity than all the “emergency full employment” bills proposed.
La propriete exclusive est un vol dans la nature=--Exclusive ownership is a theft in nature.
There is more to life than material well-being. Who would claim that the wholly wage-dependent family enjoys the dignity, the security, the range of choice and the autonomy (not to mention the leisure and freedom) of the family even partially supported by capital ownership?