An optimal form of economics, in the making since 1980

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Given the lack of military response to the genocide of Palestinian humans committed by Zionist Israel at different levels of intensity since before 1948,¹ the nation-state system (1648-present), inclusive of capitalist and socialist economic structures has abdicated its moral authority to organize human life. Reform is no longer acceptable, only structural transformation, designed to unleash all human power in concert with perpetual inertia.

At ages 5 and 6, my maternal grandparents, “Nonna and Granddad” took me to see England and Scotland in Summer 1978 and the British and United States Virgin Islands in Summer 1979. From them, I gained a sense of our world’s size through travel times and spinning their living room end-table globe upon our returns. Granddad (1915-2009) had been recently retired as a chemical engineer with the international division of Procter & Gamble (1937-76), having caught the travel bug from which my lifetime still benefits immeasurably.

For a truly synergistic economy to be optimal for all eight billion participants working in different occupations over our lifetimes, early-as-possible travel beyond each individual’s home continent is essential and can be brought about in a variety of ways. The current paradigm of international trade agreements needs to be replaced as soon as possible with post nation-state system multi-global space exploration missions to ensure the ongoing preservation of human civilization.²

At age 7 in Winter 1979-80, a new paradigm of economics solidified in my mind though the solar system scope and the idea of artificial scarcity vs practical abundance best expressed by Armen Papazian since 2011³ would coalesce after my undergraduate years at the University of Dayton (1991-95) just after the Cold War as shown below. This event in 1980 took hold as I was gazing at the Sycamores on either side of the bank of the Little Miami River, running parallel to State Route 68 as my parents drove our brown Ford Pinto south toward Xenia, Ohio from Yellow Springs, 20 miles east of Dayton, 11 miles west of Huffman Prairie on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (1917), a primary nuclear target of the Soviet Union where heavier than air powered flight was perfected by Wilbur and Orville Wright in 1905 and six miles north of Tecumseh’s birthplace and village, Oldtown, the original Chillicothe in 1768. We were enroute to Nonna and Granddad’s House, purchased in 1966 as their “dream house,” enjoyed until 1982 when they downsized into a townhouse community from which we embarked on five more international trips before and during the first of my high school years (1987-91). The pantry, enclosed in a house between two inclined yards with English style gardens was for Nonna (1917-2015) who had wanted a pantry of her own since the years when she worked her way through her undergraduate years (1935-37) as a housekeeper, Granddad as a delivery man on bicycle for a dry cleaner.

Nonna’s dream house with a pantry was built in 1913, a stately though not pretentious three story residence with a basement workshop for Granddad in northern Cincinnati. The almost-mansion in a small neighborhood with about fifteen similar houses bordered a working class neighborhood just off the newly constructed Interstate 71 that better integrated Southwest Ohio with Northeast Ohio. As citizen Cold Warriors, we were engaged in a psychological death match with the Soviet Union (1917-1991) to determine which economic system would lead human civilization to the stars; meaning living on, within or above planets and large asteroids around the sun and other stars.⁴ Killing communism, including communists was understood incorrectly as a duty toward this goal, the ultimate end that our founders must have had in the back of their mind for current living generations by highlighting the stars in our banner. Our sporty navy blue star field on our national uniform of the mind and heart ensured our coming victory against the Soviets’ uninspiring yellow hammer and sickle on a red background, essentially a garden equipment label. Such were my impressions as I entered into my double digits.

Being temporarily though semi-violently detained by a tall Soviet guard inside Lenin’s Tomb in Red Square in Summer 1986 at age 13 for casually having my hands in my pockets while waiting in the tourist line changed my perspective on our enemy’s garden tool label/flag. After determining that I was not carrying a weapon(s) in my pockets, being eye to eye, youth to youth about ten years apart, I offered Lenin’s guard a mint Lifesaver from my roll that was in my pocket. Nonna rapped her cane on the guard’s shin to my embarrassment and concern for her future. Claudia, our engaging Polish guide talked down the clearly frightened guard in Russian. Butterflies carried me through the rest of the tomb without my hands in my pockets, past Lenin’s body encased in glass, the first dead body I ever saw and out the door next to the Kremlin wall garden. There, inspecting the manicured bushes, I unconsciously put my U.S. hands back in my U.S. pockets as I processed what just happened, what could have just happened and what didn’t just happen and why. I think what may have happened was a precursor to what occurred from 1989-91 between our two superpowers – gained respect through unnecessary confrontation since 1945, followed by a hijacking of the precarious post Cold War peace by ideologues within the U.S. security establishment through NATO expansion.⁵

Back to Winter 1979-80: With help from the Little Miami Sycamores, from which I thought that money came from in the form of paper from wood pulp, I observed that a U.S. Dollar (USD), then more commonly exchanged in hard copy form at retail stores for goods “could travel around the world for no reason,” no intrinsic reason I would learn years later.⁶ The positive changes in the lives of buyers, sellers and their dependents that existed and exists from continuously exchanging the army green USDs with the nice earthy smell compared to the non-smells of all other non-global reserve national currencies seemed like they could be achieved more efficiently through what I would identify from 1994-96 as synergistic interchange. By this new idea, I expected better and more timely economic input-output feedback loops comprising an accelerated form of present human civilization without the USDs constantly getting in our way, physically but also in terms of mental preoccupation away from occupation – being deeply occupied in thought and action, essentially over-the-horizon research and development existing at every moment among all defacto-integrated humans.

Our family’s identity with occupation or “a job well done,” no matter the task as opposed to income as a measure of worth or social position was a dwindling expression of the Protestant work ethic, the timber with which the U.S. was built, unfortunately upon the foundation of slavery during the removal of indigenous humans. Decedents of the former would become teammates and coaches of mine in multiple sports, yielding the greatest of memories and continued inspiration.

All legitimate occupations, even banking were given as inherently noble when I was growing up if only because bankers were humans too, later including two out of four of my older half brothers who fell into banking to make up for lost time after trying other careers. Dad (1919-2007) could afford this warm interpersonal charity toward bankers, I believe because he earned a superabundance of adulation from his pediatric patients, all of them as near as I could tell. I heard the gratitude for Dad’s meticulous approach to his practice in the voices of worried mothers through our home landline telephone, answered by me every hour or so in the evenings and over the weekends from about 1979 to 1991. My self-appointed role for over a decade was to support Dad’s roles as area pediatrician and hospital medical director for different hospitals over his career (1944-99) until he finally rejected their blatant for-profit approach as illegitimate to his occupation within science and returned to private practice in Xenia, Ohio where he finished his career.

Like many doctors, Dad “was [very] bad with money” because he saw its nature as an obstacle to good medicine, up to the point where unopened bills on our stairs landing inhibited my ability to answer our landline phone in the kitchen corner from any point in the house before the third ring with Cold War style intensity. Dad’s widening bills pile added a kind of tip-toe cone drill to my American football route running practice routine during my faster and faster phone answering times.

Independent of my dad’s annoyance with the convoluted function of money, expressed through extended muffled curses in the lower register which I could hear from upstairs while he was paying bills late on the couch with a photo album-sized checkbook and his wooden lap table after I was supposed to be sleeping, I have always hated the existence of pay lines in a retail setting, even more than Dad. Dad, an original master of the beeper though who sidestepped ever signing up for email in the 1990s and 00s was able to cloak his impatience in pay lines, probably by using the wait time to think about his patients. To me, instead of anticipating a little joy of owning something new based on hard work, pay lines resemble ration lines, especially with present day self-checkout technology that Dad never experienced and Mom has yet to learn.

Last week, an electronic eye over the grocery store self-checkout identified me as a shoplifter until proven innocent after I threw my free sealed chopsticks into a bag without scanning them as they had no scan code, following my deli-made sushi lunch in an attempt at preventive health. Luckily, a humorous human came to my rescue, mock scolding me for daring to steal chopsticks, sharing my discontent with the electronic eye overhead. This week, we can laugh but what will happen next week if supermarket artificial intelligence has progressed to the point of synthesizing my build, ethnicity, gate, clothes and shaving pattern into a threat profile and no longer needs aid by a humorous human or is aided by a power hungry human with no humor?

My hatred of money as a cumbersome mechanism that inhibits occupation time “in the zone,” alone and with others in the pursuit of not happiness but multi-global achievements beyond “success” at being a corporate conformist has always been experiential, never class-antagonistic in one direction or the other. This owes to my pure chance placement in the upper-middle class which I have never taken for granted, sought to defend nor destroy through voting choices or other political activity. Instead, since 1996, I have utilized my good fortune to re-imagine and redesign in conceptual-philosophical form as specific-as-possible, better structures to outlast current generations now alive, analogous to house remodeling which many of us have seen up close even if this is not our core background. With better structure, “social mobility” within an outdated structure can seem like a deceptive notion when viewed future-retroactively, which it likely has been.

None of us within the global population need any longer debase ourselves by accepting and promoting slight variations of capitalism and socialism, two non-imaginative templates that we have all inherited from modern history, neither of which have proven effective for all. For me, cryptocurrencies also fall into this category, as they are also artificial scarcity-based structures, dating back to ancient Mesopotamia as part of the Agricultural Revolution with no conceptual improvements made across all this time. Worse, my working hypothesis is that “crypto” was invented by global economic elitists, designed to appear anti-establishment only to be copied by the nation-state system in the form of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), yielding defacto totalitarian control.⁷

As a promising scholar-athlete growing up in a small and racially integrated college hometown, inclusive of different working class sections, everyone who was even slightly athletic or even just showed interest in sports was needed just to field any of our high school teams, some of which were competitive and some of which were not, though every kid who wanted to could participate and develop to their individual maximum ability.⁸ The team concept in sports is central to what I have termed the homeplanet since Summer 2003, applicable to perpetually securing human existence from multiple omnidirectional threats – eight billion brothers and sisters in arms, redirected to subdue a brutal universe, the idea that natural forces care not whether humans exist or not.⁹ By subdue, I do not mean that we should submit nature to human will or vice versa inviting human extinction in both cases but instead, through human reason derived from nature, to live with unforgiving and heartless natural forces in harmony, as bountiful, supportive and inspiring as they can also be. (To date, Xenia, Ohio, referenced above has been significantly impacted by tornadoes in 2000 and 1974.)¹⁰

From 1999-2000, I was able to outline before several small audiences more specifics of my philosophy of abundance-based economics in the context of my study of international relations and history before two graduate degree programs from 2001 to 2012 temporarily moved my core concerns to the periphery of my efforts to change the global establishment from within. Given the enthusiastic auto-subjugation to genocidal Zionism by so-called global elites, this was never possible and was an error in my judgment though not a complete waste of precious lifetime. Below are two speeches, captured by the improving technology from that era:

“Exchange-free economics speech (1999),” Martin Schwab (Vimeo). Posted February 17, 2018 (35:02): https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/256199038.

“Abundance-based Global Currency 3/4 (Mars-Earth),” Martin Schwab (YouTube) – an introduction to the audio file, “To Free Enterprise from Capitalism for Mars and Earth,” Mars Society, Toronto, August 3, 2000. [CHECK TITLE AND DATE.] Posted September 5, 2017 (30:49): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zj8CgWyyCVM&t=328s.

In 2017-18, from the natural camera light in the fields of the U.S. Midwest to deep in the mountains of southern Mexico, I was able to recapture the essence of my original insight from the 1980 timeframe:

“Abundance-based Global Currency 1/4,” Martin Schwab (YouTube). Posted August 28, 2017 (8:31): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVytYqCyIVY&t=117s.

“Abundance-based interchange economics for preventing human extinction,” Martin Schwab (Vimeo). Posted Summer 2018 (4:50): https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/282428436.

Stay tuned for a long overdue republication of my 1999 self-published pamphlet, Our New Planet: An Economic Vision for a United States of Earth, updates given as notes and re-titled in serial form here at 3×3 Global Drills. It is written as a Socratic dialogue between myself, Martin Schwab (MS) and the Prevailing Wisdom (PW) of 1999 which presents the familiar though sincere arguments in favor of the continued existence of the structure, function and supposed benefits of money as we know it. I hope that this coming project will do its part to help rekindle the constructive spirit of The Enlightenment, this time to be way more inclusive and in terms of deep space exploration, way more expansive:

REFERENCES

1. Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017 (London: Profile Books, 2020). https://archive.org/details/100yearswarpalestine/page/n1/mode/2up and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hundred_Years’_War_on_Palestine. See also, “Ilan Pappe,” Wikipedia, webpage, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilan_Papp%C3%A9. See also, Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). https://archive.org/details/the-great-war-for-civilisation/page/n7/mode/2up and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_for_Civilisation. See also, Max Blumenthal, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath:_Life_and_Loathing_in_Greater_Israel. All retrieved August 12, 2015.

2. Martin Schwab, “Eight billion humans can replace 195 nations with 36 cultural bioregions,” 3×3 Global Drills, May 15, 2025. https://3x3globaldrills.com/2025/05/15/eight-billion-humans-can-replace-195-nations-with-36-cultural-bioregions/. Retrieved August 12, 2025.

3. “‘A product that can save a system’ – Armen Papazian,” Chair for Ethics and Financial Norms (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), posted February 4, 2016 (1:51:02): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_vXWf2-kLQ. See also, Armen Papazian, Space Exploration and Money Mechanics: An Evolutionary Challenge (2012). http://www.isdhub.com/seammaec011112final.pdf. See also, Armen V. Papazian, The Space Value of Money: Rethinking Finance Beyond Risk & Time (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/978-1-137-59489-1. All retrieved August 14, 2025.

4. Buzz Aldrin and Leonard David, Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Books, 2013. https://buzzaldrin.com/mission-to-mars-my-vision-for-space-exploration/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geographic_Society. See also, Robert Zubrin, Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1999). https://archive.org/details/enteringspacecre00zubr/page/n5/mode/2up. See also, Guillermo Sohnlein, “Why I am Shifting My Focus Toward Venus,” Guillermo Sohnlein, October 1, 2021. https://www.sohnlein.com/why-i-am-shifting-my-focus-toward-venus/. See also, 100 Year Starship. 100yss.org. All retrieved August 12, 2025.

5. Scott Horton, Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine (Austin, Texas: The Libertarian Institute, 2024). https://libertarianinstitute.org/books/provoked-how-washington-started-the-new-cold-war-with-russia-and-the-catastrophe-in-ukraine/. Retrieved August 12, 2025.

6. “Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Value,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, webpage. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/value-intrinsic-extrinsic/. See also, “Inside a McDonald’s restaurant in 1984,” Vampire Robot, posted September 22, 2022 (10:27): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsZ1mUjnMVg. See also, “A Trip to McDonald’s (1989),” Eric and Darrell, posted September 13, 2016 (15:38): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGLBATCIwAw. All retrieved August 14, 2025.

7. See also, Vince Quill, “Crypto should be about freeing people, not esoteric tech — Vitalik Buterin,” Cointelegraph, July 2, 2025. https://cointelegraph.com/news/crypto-freeing-people-not-esoteric-tech-vitalik. See also, Jon Danielsson, “The legacy of cryptocurrencies,” VoxEU, June 23, 2023. https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/legacy-cryptocurrencies. See also, Kermit L. Schoenholtz and Stephen Cecchetti, “Central bank digital currency: The battle for the soul of the financial system,” VoxEU, July 8, 2021. https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/central-bank-digital-currency-battle-soul-financial-system. All retrieved August 14, 2025.

8. Martin Schwab, “Camaraderie through endeavor – across spacetime: Reflections and recommendations from a participant-observer of late 20th century American football and 2020s solar system(s) building,” 3×3 Global Drills, April 29, 2024. https://3x3globaldrills.com/2024/04/29/camaraderie-through-endeavor-across-space-time-reflections-and-recommendations-from-a-participant-observer-of-late-20th-century-american-football-and-2020s-solar-systems-building/. Retrieved August 14, 2025.

9. Martin A. Schwab, Homeplanet Defense: Synergizing the Global Populace to Subdue a Brutal Universe (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada: FriesenPress, 2014). https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22267791-homeplanet-defense. See also, Martin A. Schwab, Prospects for Collaborative Power in a Brutal Universe, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hawaii, 2012. https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/f71abd7c-66fb-4d25-898f-e61f357cc386/content. See also, Martin A. Schwab, Homeplanet Defense: Strategic Thought for a World in Crisis (West Conshoshocken, Pennsylvania: Infinity Publishing, 2005). http://www.buybooksontheweb.com/product.aspx?ISBN=0-7414-2597-1. All retrieved August 14, 2025.

10. “2000 Xenia tornado,” Wikipedia, webpage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Xenia_tornado. See also, “1974 Xenia tornado,” Wikipedia, webpage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974_Xenia_tornado. Both retrieved August 14, 2025.