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The Kelso Institute 

The Kelso Institute | January, 2010

Louis O. Kelso (1913-91) was a political economist in the classical tradition of Smith, Marx and Keynes. He was also a corporate and financial lawyer, author, lecturer and merchant banker who is chiefly remembered today as the inventor and pioneer of the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), the prototype of the leveraged buy-out which Kelso invented to enable working people without savings to buy stock in their employer company and pay for it out of its future dividend yield.  

The Capitalist Manifesto 

Louis O. Kelso, Mortimer Jerome Adler | January, 1975

The Capitalist Manifesto is intended to replace the Communist Manifesto as a call to action, first of all in our own country, and then, with our country’s leadership, everywhere else in the world. It is our industrial power and capital wealth, together with our institutions of political liberty and justice, that make America the place where the capitalist revolution must first take place to establish economic liberty and justice for all.