Louis Kelso is the founding father of the modern ESOP movement. He was a merchant banker who believed deeply in democracy. His fear was that if the economy continued along its current path it would result in 10% of the people owning 90% of the wealth of the country which would destroy the middle class and result in the total demise of democracy.

“Kelso long believed that he had not originated a new economic theory but simply discovered a vital fact that the classical economists had somehow overlooked. This fact was the key to understanding why the private property, free market economy was notoriously unstable, pursuing a roller coaster course of exhilarating highs and terrifying descents into economic and financial collapse.

This missing fact, which Kelso had uncovered over years of intensive reading, research and thought, drastically modifies the classical paradigm which has dominated formal economics since Adam Smith. It concerns the effect of technological change on the distributive dynamics of a private property, free market economy. Technological change, Kelso concluded, makes tools, machines, structures and processes ever more productive while leaving human productivity largely unchanged. The result is that primary distribution through the free market economy (whose distributive principle is “to each according to his production”) delivers progressively more market-sourced income to capital owners and progressively less to workers who make their contributions through labor.” (Wikipedia)

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