Worker productivity gains measured by exponentially greater ratios of productive capital (“machines”––the non-human factor of production) is useless in a technological age where computers are able to manage businesses, schedule factories, maintain inventories, operate automatic factories, and control many types of mechanical systems and robots in the performance of complicated operations that produce products and services. Binary economist Louis Kelso attributed most changes in the productive capacity of the world since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to technological improvements in our capital assets, and a relatively diminishing proportion to human labor. Capital, in Kelso’s terms, does not “enhance” labor productivity (labor’s ability to produce economic goods). It makes many forms of labor unnecessary. Furthermore, according to Kelso, productive capital is increasingly the source of the world’s economic growth and, therefore, should become the source of added property ownership incomes for all. Kelso postulated that if both labor and capital are interdependent factors of production, and if capital’s proportionate contributions are increasing relative to that of labor, then equality of opportunity and economic justice demands that the right to property (and access to the means of acquiring and possessing property) must in justice be extended to all.
