EVEN in an age that venerates heresy, the iconoclastic philosophy of Louis Orth Kelso outrages many a professional economist. "A crackpot theory," argues Money Expert Milton Friedman. "Instead of saying that labor is exploited, Kelso says that capital is exploited. It's Marx stood on its head." Replies Kelso: "Damn rightand what's wrong with that?"
Kelso, 56, a highly successful San Francisco corporate lawyer, author and sometime economist, insists that economic ideologists as diverse as Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes have been wrong. They have overstressed one factorthe role of laborin the production...