There is an economic fault line running throughout the world which today’s economic gurus seem unable to explain or remedy: the widening wealth and income gap between a tiny rich elite and multitudes of poor in every country between and within developed and developing nations. With global communications, the global economy, and our global environment, we cannot help but feel the tremors inside and outside national borders. These growing economic imbalances have promoted bloody conflicts, widespread starvation, international crime and corruption, depletion of the planet’s non-replenishable resources, unconscionable destruction of the environment and systematic suppression of human potential and life-enhancing technology.

One post-scarcity visionary of the 20th Century, lawyer-economist Louis Kelso, understood the power of technology either to liberate or dehumanize people. Popularly known as the inventor of the employee stock ownership plan (ESOP), Kelso observed that modern capital tools and their phenomenal power to "do more with less" have offered people an escape from scarcity to shared abundance.

As a lawyer Kelso also saw that the design of our "invisible" institutional environment and social tools determines the quality of people’s relationship to technology. Such intangible things as our laws and financial systems determine which people will be included or excluded from sharing of access to equal economic opportunity, power and capital incomes.

Access to capital ownership, asserted Kelso, is as fundamental a human right as the right to the fruits of one’s labor. Kelso argued that the democratization of capital credit is the "social key" to universalizing access to future ownership of productive wealth, so that every person, as an owner, could eventually gain income independence through the profits from one’s capital.

At the heart of what Kelso called "binary economics" is a simple but revolutionary proposition. Kelso stated that people could legitimately create economic value through two (thus binary) factors of production:

Labor (which Kelso defined as all forms of economic work by people, including manual, intellectual, creative, and entrepreneurial work, and so-called "human capital"), and

Capital (defined by Kelso as anything non-human contributing the production of marketable goods and services, including tools, machines, land, structures, systems, and patents).

Capital, in Kelsonian terms, does not merely "enhance" labor’s ability to produce economic goods. (It wasn’t Bill Gates’ labor that accounted for the increase in his wealth in one year’s time from billion to billion; his capital would have kept producing even if Bill Gates were in a coma.) According to Kelso, capital (increasingly the source of economic growth) should increasingly become the source of added property incomes for all.