ESOPs and Capital Ownership

Louis O. Kelso and A.H. Raskin on ESOPs (1983)



Louis O. Kelso was a lawyer and economic thinker who sought to find a way to preserve capitalism from the competition of communism as an alternative within the context of the early Cold War. His non-conformist "capitalism" might be compared to the peoples' capitalism ideas of G. K. Chesterton in which ownership is distributed to as many people as possible within the economy. Kelso developed the idea of Binary Economics to explain the need for expanded capital ownership in light of industrial production and the dominance of capital instead of labor. In 1956 Louis Kelso invented the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) to put his ideas into practice. In 1958 he collaborated with the philosopher Mortimer Adler to write The Capitalist Manifesto that is considered the primary source of his economic theories......A.H. RaskinAs chief national labor correspondent and editorial board member of the New York Times for many years, A.H. Raskin has chronicled labor's battles over foreign affairs since World War II. He was also a consultant on international labor to the U.S. Department of Labor in 1977-78