An effective world government, therefore, must adopt and administer an economic program designed to: (a) Utilize and conserve natural resources, making them available, on a just basis, for the use of successive generations; (b) End involuntary poverty and insecurity and the exploitation of man by man and of one social group by another social group; (c) Make necessary public services generally available on equal terms, to all mankind; and (d) Guarantee equal opportunity to earth-dwellers based on the greatest good to the greatest number.
Feeding, clothing, housing and educating an agricultural village was a prime consideration at an early stage in social history. Providing the necessaries and amenities of life in a commercial-industrial city occupied the attention of city fathers as a consequence of the shift from agriculture to trade and commerce as the principle source of livelihood. Caring for the physical, physiological and cultural needs of populations in the United States, Britain, Japan and other growing commercial-industrial nations presented difficult challenges. The organization, expansion, defense and improvement of the American, British, Japanese and any other contemporary empire, posed even larger and more complex problems which have nagged mankind during recent generations. Recently, the planet-wide revolution of 1750-1970 has brought the entire human family with 3,700 million members isolated in 140 different nations, face to face with political, economic and social problems on a planet-wide scale. These problems are planet-wide in their dimensions. Measures designed for their solution must be equally planet-wide.
Villages, cities, regions and nations have learned, often the hard way, how to think, plan and act in terms of their own interests, or, more concretely, in the interest of their owners, masters and exploiters. It is with politics and economics of this planet-wide level that we of the present generation are particularly concerned.
Dwellers in western Europe and North America have to deal with the politics and economics of monopoly capitalism. Its central offices are generally located in particular countries--Britain, Holland, France, Germany, where big business enterprises had their beginnings and from which representatives of oil, steel, textile, motor and banking enterprises spilled over into the territory of their competitors as well as into the "third world" of erstwhile colonies and other dependencies.