
Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism (2017) - throwaway3157
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20170728-monopoly-was-invented-to-demonstrate-the-evils-of-capitalism
======
dr_dshiv
Here is the crux of the article, beginning with the father of the inventor,
Elizabeth Magie:

"Travelling around America in the 1870s, George had witnessed persistent
destitution amid growing wealth, and he believed it was largely the inequity
of land ownership that bound these two forces – poverty and progress –
together. So instead of following Twain by encouraging his fellow citizens to
buy land, he called on the state to tax it. On what grounds? Because much of
land’s value comes not from what is built on the plot but from nature’s gift
of water or minerals that might lie beneath its surface, or from the
communally created value of its surroundings: nearby roads and railways; a
thriving economy, a safe neighbourhood; good local schools and hospitals. And
he argued that the tax receipts should be invested on behalf of all.

Determined to prove the merit of George’s proposal, Magie invented and in 1904
patented what she called the Landlord’s Game. Laid out on the board as a
circuit (which was a novelty at the time), it was populated with streets and
landmarks for sale. The key innovation of her game, however, lay in the two
sets of rules that she wrote for playing it.

Under the ‘Prosperity’ set of rules, every player gained each time someone
acquired a new property (designed to reflect George’s policy of taxing the
value of land), and the game was won (by all!) when the player who had started
out with the least money had doubled it. Under the ‘Monopolist’ set of rules,
in contrast, players got ahead by acquiring properties and collecting rent
from all those who were unfortunate enough to land there – and whoever managed
to bankrupt the rest emerged as the sole winner (sound a little familiar?)"

~~~
WalterBright
There have been many games that purport to demonstrate that free markets are a
failure, all of them had to rig the rules to make that happen.

Monopoly, for example, is a zero sum game. There is no possibility of
increasing the supply nor making more efficient use of existing supply. Win-
win solutions are pretty much impossible.

~~~
dTal
That's exactly the crux of the observation about land and rent-seeking that
Monopoly seeks to illustrate - you can't just _make more land_.

~~~
WalterBright
Of course you can make more. Build a 10 story building and you've got 10x the
floor space. People do that all the time in places were land is in short
supply. Monopoly is a child's game that has no connection with how markets
actually work.

~~~
BlargMcLarg
And how often can you repeat this until you have effectively solved the
optimum, and the situation devolves into zero-sum anyway? Are we growing the
pie, or are we just rediscovering how big the pie is by optimizing better?

>Monopoly is a child's game that has no connection with how markets actually
work.

Those aren't mutually exclusive. As far as I understand, the idea of Monopoly
isn't to show how markets work. Its to show how finite resources such as land
interact on a semi-free market. Which is exactly why lots of countries are now
having problems with investors, foreign or not, buying up everything and
driving up prices.

~~~
WalterBright
> having problems

Most countries hurt because investors avoid them.

> buying up

Meaning tons of money and investment is flowing into the country.

------
chungy
Monopoly teaches people a view of economics being a zero-sum game and too many
people learn the wrong lessons from it. Real life isn't a zero-sum game.

~~~
pyrale
The monopoly game is not zero-sum. Money increases when you pass start, and
cards drawn are on average a source of money.

In fact, the money owned by players inflates as the game goes on.

~~~
dr_dshiv
It is zero sum, because no intentional action can increase wealth. Only the
gradual, chance-based progression of new money into the game.

In contrast, if I take out a loan and build a successful business, my
intentional actions (successful business) lead to greater money supply than if
I had failed at business.

Does that make sense, or am I missing something? I'll admit, the creation of
new wealth/money is very mysterious. How to know when it is growing the pie?

~~~
xg15
> _my intentional actions (successful business)_

Your intentional action is to start a business. Whether or not it will be a
_successful_ business and actually "generate wealth" is to a large part
dependant an chance.

Also, honestly, "It's not a zero-sum game" is beginning to sound like a
religious mantra. Of course you can define "wealth" however your want and for
the right definitions, you can certainly pull ever more of it out of nowhere.
The set of natural numbers has no upper bound.

However, many extremely relevant _kinds_ of wealth absolutely _are_ zero-sum:
There is only so much time in a day, only so much space to live in, only so
many natural resources and only so much waste the planet will tolerate. If
some class of people control disproportionately amounts of that, it will
absolutely reduce the wealth of those who don't belong to that class.

~~~
chrisco255
No, it's not dependent on chance. It's not some random spin on a roulette
wheel. It depends on if you are offering a service that is valued by the
marketplace.

There may be only so much time in a day, but the critical factor in wealth
creation is how much you can get done in a day (productivity). You can also
figure out clever ways to get more out of what you have (efficiency).

~~~
cryptica
>> It depends on if you are offering a service that is valued by the
marketplace

And who decides what is valued by the marketplace?

It's:

\- Politicians through regulation.

\- The Federal Reserve Bank by continuously creating new money out of thin
air.

\- Banks by deciding who can get the newly printed Fed money through loans and
who can't (typically based on the value of assets which individuals already
have; the result is that rich people get most of the new money through almost
0% interest loans).

\- Corporate monopolies by locking out competitors (through lobbying
government for beneficial regulations or making it prohibitively expensive for
other companies to compete due to price gouging, international tax arbitrage,
allowing losses in some sectors to selectively wipe out competitors in other
sectors, incentivizing journalists to promote the corporate agenda, etc...)

As a small startup, you can be as efficient as you like. If some corporation
doesn't want you to succeed, they can easily drain your coffers and crush you
without drawing any attention to themselves. It's not about productivity or
cleverness; that has very little value these days. Economic value these days
lies in one's ability to control the social narrative and the money supply; it
doesn't matter what the reality is.

If you have unlimited money, you can literally pay people to sit on their
asses and pick their noses all day; you can even convince them that this is
helping the company and therefore the whole economy... The company keeps
getting more money year after year so somehow all this nose-picking must be
paying off right?

The massive hose of Federal Reserve cash plugged straight into the back of the
company is just a minor detail.

And the farmers who feed everyone are fools for accepting this electronic play
money in exchange for their useful work.

~~~
chrisco255
Regulation is a reaction to demand, it's not what creates demand. We can
debate about the pros and cons of regulation, but that is quite a tangent.
Certainly some businesses are prohibited by the existence of stringent
regulations. Certainly regulations make it more expensive to start a business
in certain industries. But they do not determine what the market wants.

The Fed also doesn't create demand for products and services. That demand is
there, all the time. Right now there is latent demand in the marketplace to
extend the human lifespan to 1000 years if possible. There's demand to travel
at the speed of light or faster. Whether or not these things are even possible
is completely independent of the demand for them.

It's also quite absurd that on the tail end of a decade of a start up boom in
the tech industry that you would assert that all these factors make it
impossible to succeed today. We are on Hacker News, a site powered by
YCombinator, an incubator and investor that has helped make it possible for
hundreds of companies to succeed that you claim is impossible. The combined
valuation of the top YC companies was over $155 billion as of October, 2019.
None of these companies existed 15 years ago.

~~~
cryptica
Y Combinator is completely out of reach for most people. There are limited
slots and tens of thousands of applicants. It makes the whole selection
process essentially pseudo-random.

Also, Y Combinator is not popular because it is successful, it is successful
because it is popular.

It's no coincidence that Y Combinator operates the most popular technology
news link aggregator in the world which all the big corporate tech executives
read. This significantly affects the odds of success for startups which join Y
Combinator. They choose who wins and it doesn't matter who they choose. If you
are selected into YC, it's like winning the lottery.

They should do an experiment; filter out all the obvious scam applications
then for all remaining applications (tens of thousands of them probably) run a
random number generator to select startups based on keywords that YC likes. I
bet the success rate for that batch wouldn't be very different from previous
batches.

~~~
jacquesm
YC was successful before it was popular.

------
andy_ppp
I love how everyone who wins at monopoly acts like a right arse to the other
people and it turns out it was just rolls of the dice that decided if they
won... I certainly always _feel_ like I deserve to have won.

~~~
mikestew
As the title implies, the game was designed to be a lot like real life, and it
sounds like that from your POV it has succeeded.

~~~
epistasis
Reminds me of the story of the lucky coin:

> If 1024 fair coins are each tossed 10 times, chances are good (> 63%) that
> at least one will come up heads 10 times in a row; and that coin will be
> proud to explain how its skill, faith, guts & determination made its
> achievement possible, and how that combo can work for you too.

[https://twitter.com/bayesiangirl/status/1214753289528434688?...](https://twitter.com/bayesiangirl/status/1214753289528434688?s=21)

~~~
misterbwong
I get your (and parent/grandparent's) points but this line of thinking leads
to unnecessarily cynical and pessimistic thinking rather than recognition that
success/failure are inherently probabilistic.

Yes, plenty is out of our control and luck is often ignored. Yes, some people
get really lucky and some people get really unlucky and it sucks. However,
this doesn't mean that "skill, faith, guts, & determination" have nothing to
do with their success. These behaviors/traits increase your chances at success
and positive outcomes, period.

~~~
lukifer
It's a paint-mixing problem: every success story is some blend of skill,
merit, grit, pre-existing resources, and dumb luck; and post-hoc, it's non-
trivial to tease out the exact causes and proportions in a success story.

From the point of an individual actor, I agree: it's _always_ correct to
maximize your agency, knowing full-well that there are factors outside your
control that might unfairly sink you (or, unfairly cause someone to out-
compete you despite shortcomings).

That in no way contradicts the idea that there may be ecosystemic benefits to
providing resources to maximize the odds of success. To use a trivial example:
if I'm a hardware vendor hosting an app store, the success of each app will be
a blend of skill and luck. But if I provide tools like ratings, analytics, and
discoverability, I can potentially increase the odds that meritocratic apps
succeed. (Take it as read that poor interventions could also make this go the
other direction.)

One curious quirk is that in the space of game design, this luck/skill
dichotomy is flipped on its head, and turned into an explicit goal: that a
satisfying game should permit the winner to believe they won on skill, while
the loser believes they lost on luck. There's a great talk from MtG creator
Richard Garfield on the subject [0]; I'll leave you to draw your own
conclusions what inferences we should draw from this in the "game" of market
competition. :)

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av5Hf7uOu-o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av5Hf7uOu-o)

------
amelius
You should try entering a game after a few rounds have already been played.
Impossible.

That's how monopoly works in real life.

(Thinking about it, I guess demonstrating this is the function of the jail in
the game).

------
howmayiannoyyou
My children learned how to negotiate via family monopoly games. This has made
parenting MUCH more difficult.

~~~
QuesnayJr
I think they would have figured it out eventually. We never play Monopoly, but
I sometimes suspect that my children are actually reincarnated lawyers.

~~~
sokoloff
My 4.5 year old (at the time) was playing school with his 6 year old sibling.

Older: What is 1 plus 1?

Younger: Two. Or eleven.

I see Javascript or law in the future...

~~~
gdubs
Clearly you’re failing to teach your children binary :P

------
dsiegel2275
I've always used Monopoly as a good way to explain inflation.

If you play by the stated rules in the game, any property landed on goes up
for auction to all players if the current player doesn't want to purchase it.
Imagine what happens to the purchase price of properties in this scenario if
every player started the game with 10 times more money...

~~~
koheripbal
I've always used it as a business negotiations lesson.

The winner of the game is often the person who makes the most deals to secure
the most property monopolies.

The KEY lesson is that you can trade "down" as the loser of every single deal,
and yet still win by virtue of the fact that you've made the MOST deals.

Making deals captures untapped value. There's actually a LOT more strategy to
Monopoly than the people in this thread realize.

~~~
dkonofalski
Have you actually played Monopoly until the end? The winner is not usually the
person that makes the most deals. It's the person who makes the best deals for
the dice rolls. If you buy blue, green, and yellow blocks through deals,
you're almost always guaranteed to win regardless of how many deals you've
made outside of those. The remaining players can continue to make deals and,
as long as you don't accept them, they can never win.

------
neilparikh
The title is incorrect. It was invented to demonstrate with exclusionary land
ownership. Even Adam Smith recognised that this would be a problem.

~~~
throwawayhhakdl
Further, The introduction of hotels to the game was not intended initially.
Adding hotels causes more housing to appear, which is antithetical to the
point of housing shortages

------
kiliantics
The game's creator, Lizzie Magie, was a proponent of Georgism[0], not exactly
anti-capitalist, but supported common ownership of land.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism)

~~~
notacoward
Calling Georgism "common ownership of land" is seriously misleading. A tax is
not ownership, no matter how many times the neo-feudal "vulgar libertarians"
(as Georgists and geolibertarians call them) try to establish the trope via
mere repetition.

~~~
nwah1
Common ownership is the term Henry George used. Of course, keeping the title
system was specifically preferred in order to limit the scope of government.

Just need to pay for the land you use, since it belongs to all.

We should, perhaps, distinguish common ownership from public ownership. The
concept of the Commons is one that people ought to understand. Something can
be owned in common without it being managed by the government.

~~~
notacoward
George wrote a lot about the commons, and you're right that it's important to
understand the relationship between state/common/private ownership, but I
stand by the statement that its use _here_ \- without that context, where more
common capitalist vs. communist notions of property are already being
discussed - is misleading. It's like throwing "bad faith" into a discussion
without being clear that it refers to a domain-specific concept from law or
existentialist philosophy.

------
cryptica
"Georgism" is actually a really great idea but the name is terrible. I
remember I tried to discuss it with someone once and they chuckled when I said
the word "Georgism". They couldn't actually listen to my argument.

I think names are very important. For example, I find it ingenious that the
country "French Guyana" has the word "French" in it and that there is another
country in South America already called "Guyana"; it's probably a key reason
why "French Guyana" is still part of France; they literally have no identity
without France; they'd have to invent and popularize a new word first and
that's very difficult to do.

~~~
Apocryphon
Just call it LVT, as the land value tax is the policy focus of the ideology.
It would fit in next to other acronyms in vogue like UBI, MMT, FJG, etc.

------
joshspankit
Huh.

And I always thought we were missing something because players would always
end up bickering and hating the experience (except the winner, and it brought
out the worst in them).

Now I see that was actually the core lesson.

------
dang
Two big threads from 2017:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14819622](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14819622)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14889109](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14889109)

------
raintrees
The board game Cashflow is closer to reality than Monopoly, especially the 202
version, which provides for paper assets options, as well as loss of
investment properties to acts of nature. A good way to learn basic investment
evaluation using play money.

------
3xblah
Think of the WWW as a Monopoly board. Except unlike the board game the first
move involves no roll of the dice. The class of players known as users always
start the game on the same certain properties, owned by a small set of players
known as Google, Amazon, etc. Microsoft used to have a marketing slogan to
address the growing presence of the internet: "Where do you want to go today?"
The question we should have is, "Why does Microsoft need to know?" Why do
these companies need to know what we are going to do next? In the WWW monopoly
a small set of players collect rent from nearly every user and strive to know
every users' next move. It may be through the control of websites or devices,
or both. As they say, the game is rigged.

~~~
iso1210
Microsoft were certainly the first movers, but they only owned the stations.
Muppets.

Amazon, Google, Facebook moved in and bought almost all the properties.

Apple are doing very well from owning the purples.

------
dzhiurgis
What if we limited max amount of property owned by a person (by sq ft or
value)?

------
solotronics
How else should land be distributed if not via free market capitalism? Land is
a scarce resource that people want. Either some person/corporation owns it or
the government does. Its easy to see models where the government owns all the
property as this exists in many places around the world such as Nigeria,
China, and North Korea.

~~~
francisofascii
The best policy is a balance between total government control and total
private control. An individual can own land, but the government can tax it, or
allow easements, etc. Governments can own land and allow individuals on it. So
it doesn't have to be one or the other.

------
DonHopkins
Also check out Ralph Anspach's "Anti-Monopoly". There's a book about the huge
lawsuit it caused, and it's an amazing story!

[http://www.antimonopoly.com/](http://www.antimonopoly.com/)

>Anti-Monopoly – a board game with a twist

>This game may look familiar, but don't be fooled – it's a real estate trading
game with an exciting twist! Players choose free enterprise or monopoly, then
play under different rules. Competitors charge fair market value while
monopolists take over whole neighborhoods and jack up rents. In real life,
monopolists have an unfair advantage. But in Anti-Monopoly, competitors have a
fair shot at coming out on top!

Parker Brother's Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle

[https://www.amazon.com/Billion-Dollar-Monopoly-
Swindle/dp/09...](https://www.amazon.com/Billion-Dollar-Monopoly-
Swindle/dp/0966649702)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Anspach](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Anspach)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-
Monopoly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Monopoly)

>Anti-Monopoly is a board game made by San Francisco State University
Professor Ralph Anspach in response to Monopoly.

>Background and history

>Anspach created Anti-Monopoly in part as a response to the lessons taught by
the mainstream game, which he believed created the impression that monopolies
were something desirable. His intent was to demonstrate how harmful monopolies
could be to a free-enterprise system, and how antitrust laws work to curtail
them in the real world.

>The game was originally to be produced in 1973 as Bust the Trust, but the
title was changed to Anti-Monopoly. It has seen multiple printings and
revisions since 1973. In 1984, a new version appeared as Anti-Monopoly II;
this version was updated and re-released in 2005 without the numerical
designation. The game is currently still in print, and is produced and
distributed worldwide by University Games.

>Trademark lawsuit

>See also: History of the board game Monopoly (Anti-Monopoly, Inc. vs. General
Mills Fun Group)

>In 1974, Parker Brothers sued Anspach over the use of the "Monopoly" name,
claiming trademark infringement. While preparing his legal defense, Anspach
became aware of Monopoly's history prior to Charles Darrow's sale of the game
to Parker in 1935, and how it had evolved from Elizabeth Magie's original
Landlord's Game into the version Darrow appropriated. Anspach based his
defense on the grounds that the game itself existed in effectively the public
domain before Parker purchased it, and therefore Parker's trademark claim on
it should be nullified. The case dragged on for ten years,[1] with numerous
appeals and overturned judicial verdicts, until Anspach and Parker ultimately
reached a settlement, permitting him to continue using the name Anti-Monopoly
and distributing the game.[2]

>For a time during the dispute, the game was marketed as simply "Anti."

How a Fight Over a Board Game Monopolized an Economist's Life

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB125599860004295449?mod=rss_US...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB125599860004295449?mod=rss_US_News)

The Story of Class Struggle, America's Most Popular Marxist Board Game

[https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/58318/story-class-
strugg...](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/58318/story-class-struggle-
americas-most-popular-marxist-board-game)

------
DonHopkins
Twenty years ago I made "Micropoly", a board game about Microsoft's monopoly.
The company names on the properties are a bit dated by now!

[https://web.archive.org/web/20001018211021/http://www.microp...](https://web.archive.org/web/20001018211021/http://www.micropoly.com/)

Here's the board:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20010615183227/http://www.microp...](https://web.archive.org/web/20010615183227/http://www.micropoly.com/micropoly-
board-med.jpg)

And this is the XML file that defined the board, properties, utilities, cards,
etc, which were generated by a Perl script and some PostScript:

[https://donhopkins.com/home/micropoly](https://donhopkins.com/home/micropoly)

    
    
        <CHANCECARD TITLE="Download">
            <IMAGE X="130" Y="70" SCALE="0.55" EPSFILE="graphics/gatespie.eps"/>
            <TEXT X="10" Y="40" SIZE="10">Go directly to Reinstall Windows.</TEXT>
            <TEXT X="10" Y="25" SIZE="10">Do not pass Start,</TEXT>
            <TEXT X="10" Y="10" SIZE="10">do not collect $200.</TEXT>
        </CHANCECARD>
    
        <CORNERS>
            <CORNER NAME="Start Menu" INDEX="0" NAME1="START" NAME2="MENU" NAME3="" CAPTION1="COLLECT" CAPTION2="$200 SALARY" CAPTION3="AS YOU PASS" IMAGE="DrawMicropolyStartMenuCorner"/>
            <CORNER NAME="Reinstall Windows" INDEX="1" NAME1=" REINSTALL" NAME2=" WINDOWS" NAME3="" CAPTION1="JUST" CAPTION2="REBOOTING" CAPTION3="" IMAGE="DrawMicropolyReinstallWindowsCorner"/>
            <CORNER NAME="Free Software" INDEX="2" NAME1=" FREE" NAME2=" SOFTWARE" NAME3="" CAPTION1="" CAPTION2="" CAPTION3="" IMAGE="DrawMicropolyFreeSoftwareCorner"/>
            <CORNER NAME="Goto Reinstall" INDEX="3" NAME1=" CORRUPTED" NAME2=" REGISTRY" NAME3="" CAPTION1=" GOTO" CAPTION2=" REINSTALL" CAPTION3="" IMAGE="DrawMicropolyCrashAndReinstallCorner"/>
        </CORNERS>
    

Micropoly

The Microsoft Monopoly Game

Micropoly is the Microsoft Monopoly Game! It's a parody of Microsoft that's
fun to play, a free board game based the rules of Anti-Monopoly, and a
political statement protected under the First Amendment.

This web site exists to freely distribute the full set of graphics and rules
for Micropoly, in the "open source" spirit of the original folk game monopoly
invented by an Atlantic City Quaker woman.

You are encouraged to download the graphics, print out copies of the game set
for yourself and friends, and have fun playing Micropoly!

The Goals of the Micropoly Project:

To make a political statement about the effect of Microsoft's monopoly on the
economy.

To raise awareness of the original folk game monopoly invented by Quakers and
illegitimately patented and pirated by Parker Brothers.

To promote the alternative Anti-Monopoly rules, invented by Ralph Anspach in
1973, that teach why monopolies are bad.

To distribute the graphics and rules of Micropoly as a free "open source"
game, true to the spirit of the Quaker who originally invented monopoly.

To develop a computerized version of monopoly, that can be customized with any
local theme and artwork, and played over the Internet.

To imitate life imitating art imitating life imitating art, and so forth.

Micropoly synergistically illustrates several important points, by drawing
parallels between the time of the Great Depression and the end of the
Twentieth Century:

Monopolies are bad, and competition is good.

The original rules of monopoly require everyone to play as a monopolist.
That's why companies like Microsoft and Parker Brothers like the lesson it
teaches: being a monopolist is good, and in order to win you have to make the
biggest monopoly. But the rules of Anti-Monopoly divide players into
monopolists versus competitors, resulting in a dynamic, unpredictable, more
interesting game. Competition has the same benefits in real life!

The "open source" philosophy has been around a long time before computers.

The Atlantic City Quaker woman who invented the original board game spread it
around to her friends for free. She would invite people over to play, and they
loved the game, so they made their own copies with crayons on oil cloth. This
free folk game spread around the country and was played by many people, long
before Parker Brothers knowingly decided pirated it. Today we have computer
networks, desktop publishing, color printers, and the "open source" model of
software development, so it is much easier to spread the free Micropoly game
all over the world.

Big companies abuse the patent and legal systems to pirate and exploit other
peoples original ideas.

Parker Brothers pirated monopoly from its original inventors, illegitimately
patented an "open source" folk game, perpetrated an extremely successful
propaganda campaign to convince the world that Monopoly(TM) was invented by
Charles B Darrow, and aggressively drove other companies out of business with
frivolous lawsuits.

They waged a nasty 10 year legal assault on Ralph Anspach, inventor of the
"Anti-Monopoly" game, ruining his successful game company, even though his
case finally made it to the Supreme Court and won!

As a result of his hard fought victory, the true story of Parker Brother's
Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle has been published for all to read, and it's
safe to call a game "anything-opoly".

We are very grateful that he never gave up, and won in spite of Parker
Brothers' dirty tricks. We thank him, because he made it possible for us to
publish Micropoly, and generously offered to let us use his superior Anti-
Monopoly rules, which so perfectly illustrate the point of Micropoly.

The similarities in the monopolistic behaviors of Parker Brothers and
Microsoft should be obvious.

Openopoly

The software used to produce Micropoly will be freely distributed, as well as
the Micropoly content, to serve as an example of how to make your own
personalized monopoly game.

We are developing a free "Openopoly" architecture based on XML, whose purpose
is to automate the production of custom monopoly games, both printed board
games and multi-player online computer games.

Micropoly will be the first example of such a custom game, so anyone will be
able to drop in their own text and graphics, turn the crank, and produce a
version of monopoly localized for their own city, university, company, church,
sports team, or favorite political cause.

[...]

------
dr_dshiv
Wow, I guess that was a revelation and something worth appreciating: the idea
that if we just take a little bit of everyone's wealth and share it with the
Commonwealth, then there can be a lot more wealth for all.

~~~
GreenJelloShot
If sharing wealth leads to greater wealth, then why is it necessary to try to
take wealth (by force)? Why don't people willingly give up their wealth so
that they can make more?

If it is possible to make more wealth by giving up some, why not let people
choose whether or not they will share? If you theory holds true, then people
who share will get richer and the people who don't share will get poorer and
the problem will solve itself.

~~~
jamie_ca
Parent's "wealth for all" does not mean "wealth for each."

Of course taxing the wealthiest to share with everyone results in the
wealthiest having less than they would otherwise, which is why they tend not
do do so voluntarily.

However, if it makes most people better off, and makes society as a whole
better off, then maybe it's worth it for the government to force their most-
successful citizens away from their selfish instincts to the betterment of the
nation?

~~~
blackflame7000
>taxing the wealthiest to share with everyone results in the wealthiest having
less than they would otherwise

No taxing the wealthiest results in the wealthiest moving their capital
investments elsewhere.

~~~
dTal
This seems like an easily solvable problem, frankly. Gazillionaires don't tend
to want to _live_ in the tax havens they store their gazillions in because
(surprise) they tend to be shitholes. So you just tax the movement of money in
and out of the country - money is pointless if you can't spend it.

The reason this isn't done isn't because it's hard, it's because the foxes are
running the chicken coop.

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planetzero
I wish more people would learn from it: Monopolies are bad if it's a private
company or the government.

The outcome is still the same: a stalled industry, little to no innovation,
and many times, high prices.

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mcv
I guess that explains why it's such a terrible game. People put up with it
because it was all they had. Now we have other options, fortunately.

(I guess this comment could apply to either the boardgame, or to capitalism.)

~~~
Mountain_Skies
Monopoly sucks because of using the house rule that Free Parking is a jackpot
of money. Not doing property auctions and paying out $400 for landing on Go
are lesser reasons for it sucking. Stick to the published rules and the
problems mostly to away.

~~~
andrepd
That house rule (which is far from universally applied) is a small detail. The
game is boring (luck-based, little if any strategy) and unenjoyable in other
ways: it takes too long to finish, players who go bust early are left watching
the game continue for maybe hours, front-runners are almost certainly going to
win yet it takes an excruciatingly drawn-out process to finish the process,
etc.

~~~
pessimizer
There's a lot of strategy in Monopoly. People who don't think there's strategy
in Monopoly in my experience are people who don't understand the value of
trading, and have largely played games of it where little to no trading was
done.

If you can't imagine trading with another player in a way that would give that
player a Monopoly, you haven't exhausted the strategy space of Monopoly, a
seminal game in the history of board games that all 3M/German/Euro-style
strategy games of today owe a debt to.

I'm going to stop because I feel like I'm falling into a bizarre habit of only
commenting on HN when Monopoly is brought up negatively:)

edit: if there's an obvious, unstoppable winner at any point in any game, you
are allowed to stop playing.

~~~
andrepd
>If you can't imagine trading with another player in a way that would give
that player a Monopoly

No, I wouldn't, except if it gives a (more valuable) monopoly to me.

You talk a lot about strategy, but what strategy is that? Afaict any strategy
in Monopoly is "static", i.e. prefer orange properties, then the second set in
each street, etc. That is, the boring sort x)

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legitster
Monopoly was meant to show the benefits of Georgism - essentially a flat-value
land tax. Georgism is not opposed to capitalism. In fact, Adam Smith himself
advocated a similar tax. So did Keynes, Friedman- nearly every economist.

However, it is likely that Elizabeth Magie herself didn't quite understand
this - the Georgist set of rules in the Landlord's game doesn't quite match
what Henry George was proposing. George's proposed tax intended to drive down
rents by encouraging development of land. But the game flat out handed people
money and kept rents the same.

~~~
DubiousPusher
Henry George was more or less opposed to our current conception of capitalism.
He believed all land and narual resources should be held in common. He stated
that a person should be entitled to the product of their personal labor and
that was about it.

But being a practical man he realized the horse was well out of the barn on
private ownership of land and felt that a land value tax was essentially the
next best thing. He maintained collective ownership of natural resource beside
land though.

~~~
legitster
I feel that is an overzealous interpretation. The whole crux of his work was
that rent was unlike capital and labor and very subject to exploitation. He
very much believed in markets and accumulation of capital. You can
collectively own natural resources and still have a vibrant free trade
economy.

~~~
DubiousPusher
Yup, never said he was opposed to markets nor accumulation of capital. But
capitalism as we know it is hugely influenced by our current system of private
property. Georgeism would have many similarities to our present form of
capitalism but it would also look very different.

~~~
legitster
I guess I don't see how it would look that different. A flat value tax on land
seems less radical than a wealth tax (for example). But no one sells a wealth
tax as an end to capitalism.

~~~
DubiousPusher
You can't see how land becoming a liability rather than an asset because of
the significant tax burden it would bear might have drastic effects on modern
Western capitalism? Nor how the collective ownership of resources produced
from mines, forests, rivers and oceans would significantly change it?

