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COMCOPs, anyone? Louis O. Kelso is universally acknowledged as the father of employee stock ownership plans, or ESOPs. That's as it should be: he set up the first one, in 1956, and his San Francisco investment-banking firm, Kelso & Co., has helped engineer hundreds of others. It's a good thing for Kelso, however, that his reputation has survived his publishing forays.

Like many visionaries, Kelso writes as if the problems he's addressing are obvious and the solutions painfully simple. Take his latest effort, Democracy and Economic Power: Extending the ESOP Revolution (Ballinger Publishing Co., 1986), written with his wife, Partricia Hetter Kelso. In two chapters the Kelsos explain what's wrong with capitalism. In two more they toss out most of conventional economics.

Tall orders? The authors, alas, are only warming up. Just as we're gasping for breath, they launch into a series of inscrutable ESOP-related proposals that they promise will fix all our problems. For people who don't work, we'll have a General Stock Ownership Plan, or GSOP. For homeowners, a Residential Capital Ownership Plan, or RECOP. For somebody else -- I forget who -- an ICOP, a COMCOP, and a PUBCOP. It's all too neat, too glib, and too far removed from the real world. ESOPs are an interesting, practical experiment. If I were Louis Kelso, I wouldn't push my luck.