Books
Louis Kelso’s four books
Three are free to download in full. Democracy and Economic Power is available as an ebook, and free in Russian, Spanish and Chinese.
1958
The Capitalist Manifesto
Louis O. Kelso and Mortimer J. Adler
Despite its Cold War title, The Capitalist Manifesto of 1958 is neither a defense of traditional capitalism nor a polemical call to revolution. It is a theoretical blueprint for a capitalism redeemed of its historical flaws.
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1961
The New Capitalists
Louis O. Kelso and Mortimer J. Adler
A Proposal to Free Economic Growth from the Slavery of Savings. The companion to The Capitalist Manifesto, setting out the financing methods that let people without savings buy productive capital and pay for it from the earnings it produces.
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1967
Two-Factor Theory: The Economics of Reality
Louis O. Kelso and Patricia Hetter
Kelso and Hetter's case that wealth is produced by two factors, labor and capital, and that a free economy must make capital ownership as widespread as employment.
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1986
Democracy and Economic Power: Extending the ESOP Revolution
Louis O. Kelso and Patricia Hetter Kelso
The Kelsos' fullest statement of how ESOPs and related financing tools can extend capital ownership to every household. Available as an ebook and in Russian, Spanish and Chinese translations.
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Film and reference
Film and bibliography
We the Owners, a documentary on employee ownership, and a bibliography of works by and about Louis Kelso.
We the Owners
Employee ownership has had a growing number of articulate spokesmen over the years since Louis Kelso invented the ESOP. But one voice has been conspicuously missing — that of the employee owners themselves.
Bibliography
The Capitalist Manifesto, by Louis O. Kelso and Mortimer J. Adler, Random House, New York: 1958; reprinted Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut: 1975. Also published in French, Spanish, Greek and Japanese.
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