The following submission statement was provided by /u/Biosphere_Collapse:
---
The game Monopoly was originally created by Elizabeth Magie as a way to demonstrate the injustice of the 19th-century capitalist system, which allowed landlords to accumulate wealth without having to do anything to earn it. Her game, called the Landlord's Game, showed how rent gouging and monopolies hurt ordinary people and how a land value tax could be used to create a more equal society. While the single-tax movement that inspired Magie's game eventually died out, her game continued to be played and tweaked, becoming the internationally famous game Monopoly that we know today. This origin story is significant to the subreddit r/collapse because it shows how the same exploitative economic forces that existed in the 19th century still exist today, with landlords profiting off of rising housing prices while ordinary people struggle to make ends meet. This is a reminder that economic inequality and exploitation are systemic problems that must be addressed if we are to avoid a collapse of our current economic system.
Also: although the tweet has the word “reset” in it, this is not referencing “the great reset”conspiracy theory. I just wanted to make it crystal clear that I am in no way endorsing that.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/11nn69v/it_was_unsustainable_from_the_beginning/jbnz6gu/
The realism of Monopoly is marred by the fact that the people striving to own everything in the world *occasionally* have to pay income tax or go to jail.
Whenever I landed on Income Tax, I'd go full Monty Burns: "What do I pay these lawyers for?!"
Haven't played, or watched the Simpsons for that matter, for a few decades though.
Yes it reminds us why agression is critical to not losing against the other players. The Dodo never understood that. So that game too shows us a side of ourselves.
Have you ever heard the notion that capitalism can take anything - even stuff critical of capitalism - and eat it up, change it, and sell it back to you? The Monopoly board game is a great example of that.
[It was invented by a woman to demonstrate the evils of capitalism](https://www.huckmag.com/outdoor/sport-outdoor/the-hidden-world-of-monopoly-and-its-anti-capitalist-roots/).
She was a georgist, not an anti-capitalist, but anti-landlord. She literally wanted to abolish all taxes and nationalize land.
Shoutout to r/georgism
Edit: I described it wrong, it's more like slowly increasing the land value tax to 100%, so that the occupier of that land has to give back to the society for using that land.
Well, Georgists also want Pigouvian taxes on negative externalities, e.g., carbon tax. If you do $100 of harm to others or society at large (e.g., via pollution), you oughta pay society $100 in taxes. Like LVT, they're efficient, effective, and fair.
Edit: But one could argue that Pigouvian taxes are just a type of LVT or vice versa. There is a finite carbon "budget" that we can pump into the atmosphere before things go kablooey. One could argue that a carbon tax is just an LVT applied to that atmospheric carbon budget.
there's already social and legal precedent for it, too. we've set aside lands and declared them to be public lands in a variety of ways. people love our state and national parks and forest preserves, and for good reasons. the reason being, they're awesome.
we could do just a half step, a tiny measure, a good start so as not to upset all the BAU centrists; legally strip all corporations from owning land. reconfigure it to some kind of lease or rental agreement that comes with a nontrivial cost. and force them to deal with their own pollution on said land.
If you wanna believe big hair dude on ancient aliens (lol), then the entire reason national parks even exist is via treaty with the aliens, they're "legal" abduction sites. LOL
... although. Capitalism being what it is (convert every square inch of dirt into a strip mall), I presently have no better explanation...
The above description is a bit of a weird way to describe it. The Georgist position is that all taxes should be replaced with a land value tax as close to 100% as possible - the idea being that all non-LVT taxes are just indirect and less-efficient ways of taxing land value *anyway*, so might as well maximize tax revenue by taxing land values directly.
The tax revenues would then be spent on public works and infrastructure, and all surplus would be disbursed as a citizens' dividend - or, as it's known nowadays, a universal basic income.
And in addition to being an elegant form of taxation, LVT is just a great tax:
> Land value taxes are generally favored by economists as they do not cause economic inefficiency, and reduce inequality.[2] A land value tax is a progressive tax, in that the tax burden falls on land owners, because land ownership is correlated with wealth and income.[3][4] The land value tax has been referred to as "the perfect tax" and the economic efficiency of a land value tax has been accepted since the eighteenth century.[1][5][6]
> ...
> LVT's efficiency has been observed in practice.[18] Fred Foldvary stated that LVT discourages speculative land holding because the tax reflects changes in land value (up and down), encouraging landowners to develop or sell vacant/underused plots in high demand. Foldvary claimed that LVT increases investment in dilapidated inner city areas because improvements don't cause tax increases. This in turn reduces the incentive to build on remote sites and so reduces urban sprawl.[19] For example, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania's LVT has operated since 1975. This policy was credited by mayor Stephen R. Reed with reducing the number of vacant downtown structures from around 4,200 in 1982 to fewer than 500.[20]
> LVT is arguably an ecotax because it discourages the waste of prime locations, which are a finite resource.[21][22][23] Many urban planners claim that LVT is an effective method to promote transit-oriented development.[24][25]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
It's not giving government the land. It's retaining the value of the land for the people, for public benefit not private benefit. Anything *on* the land built by people is private property but the land remains as a commonly-held good.
The best way to do it is more like a coop that owned by all members of society instead of the government. Were all members have a say in the land use and can vote, and you have a board of directors whose sole responsibility is to insure the wishes of the members are considered.
*nationalize (Merriam-Webster) : to invest control or ownership of in the national government.*
Nationalizing all the land is *literally* "all the land is under government control and/or ownership".
Fair enough! Since the commenter I was replying to used the term "nationalizing."
I thinking more about the general conversation about Georgism (also called the single-tax movement) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
Georgism doesn't espouse nationalizing land. It sees land more like air, a natural resource that shouldn't be anyone's property (i.e., in the modern property rights sense, in that if you own something you almost always have complete control over it - to destroy, modify, exclude others). Like the environmental movement's desire to tax processes that "use" the common good of air by polluting it, under Georgism land is inherently owner-less, common property and the state charges a use fee on anyone who wants to monopolize the economic potential of a parcel. In fact George included all natural resources in his concept of "land" including air, water, forests, fisheries. Another example of a natural resource held in common, but that the government charges a use tax on (at least in the US) are radio frequencies. In our current economic model we have a confusing mix - some natural resources are held in common while others are private property. Also, mostly you can do whatever you want with your private property, but sometimes you can't.
I'm not defending Georgism, but I think it's an interesting premise. Many human cultures have a more Georgist view of land and other natural resources, although all of these (as far as I know) have much smaller populations and geographic scope than ours (many North American cultures, pre-Norman Britain, pre-Roman Germany, etc.) so the model probably doesn't scale.
It seems the way of things that communal societies get conquered and ousted by capitalist, private-ownership-is-everything cultures =(
> It’s retaining the value of the land for the people
I think you are saying giving it to the government in a more complex way here. What would be the entity that owned it? A collective? I.e. the government?
> the entity that owned it
Land does not need to be treated as a commodity. Who owns the clouds in the sky, or the wind, or the water in the sea? It is not necessary for the land to be owned by any entity. I find it honestly bizarre when you really think about it to just accept that someone actually could own part of the earth. This is especially true when you think about how that had to have come about. Someone just randomly laid claim to some land and said, "This is mine." But, by what right?
This is the take one has when they're depoliticized from a true democratic process.
It should be a state of, for and by the people, but we've never lived in that sort of place.
Something that is good for the whole isn’t always good for the individual. When society is based off the good of the majority you will have tyranny for each person. Private ownership ( with regulation ) is far better than a bureaucrat determining who can and can’t live in a place or a lawless madhouse.
A misrepresentation of a true democracy for the sole purpose of your despotic desire for private gains through anti democratic exploitation of your fellow man. Nice attempt at trying to make a spectacle of it in the form of a bureaucratic boogeyman though. You're the proto fascist petite bourgeois I presume?
Heck, I will take the Georgist compromise! At least then the youngest generation wouldn't have been totally screwed out of homes in the time they have left.
Monopoly wasn't invented by her, the other game was. The owners of monopoly had to bargain with her to sell it(she had already created a monopoly type game), and her price was that they would create (I think) 10 thousand and sell them also. Hers didn't sell well which is why no one knows about the landlord game
"Nothing sells better on MTV than a takedown of MTV" - Mark Fisher
~~Starting to sweat a bit when all of my intellectual superiors start killing themselves because of the mental gridlock of late stage omnicidal capitalism.~~
NB: Sorry, 'unalived'. We aren't allowed to discuss human mortality at this point. Labour units don't have mortality, only quotas.
The first contradiction of capitalism. The economy requires growth at all costs and the rate of profit declines as more companies use more resources to chase the market opportunities. Eventually the only source of profit is to reduce your input costs and a primary one is the employees you're already stealing surplus value from. Depressing their wage and benefits further provides the growth shareholders demand, as does cannibalising smaller companies. In doing so the consumer base is alienated and loses the ability to demand what the monopolies are now charging a higher price for.
The second contradiction of capitalism factors nature into the equation. The represented cost of production isn't the actual one because companies externalise the longterm damage they do to people and the environment. It's growth if they don't pay their taxes or save money dodging waste disposal regulations. Over time it's not only a demand-side crisis, but a supply-side crisis because the overall metabolic capacity of the environment is lost. Overfarming degrades the land and future yields are diminished unless greater amounts of chemical inputs are used, further degrading the land and the waterways the agribusiness isn't responsible for.
Those two contradictions are the unsustainability of the system. They can't be resolved without removing the pure abstraction of commodities as exchange value and the layers of parasitism baked into corporations.
The original version (The Landlord's Game) had an alternate ruleset where players would pay taxes on the spots they owned and would all equally receive a dividend. The game ends when the players finally get bored of playing - because it would go on forever, with nobody going bankrupt and nobody winning or losing.
There's a drone flying above the board that puts a bullet in your head if you try to flip it, and every time you ask if the drone makes anyone else uncomfortable the other players call you a conspiracy theorist.
Yeah we’re nailing the board down. At a certain point during the game, Mac’s gonna get very pissed off because he’s not doing very well. He’s gonna try and flip the board over.
Modern day monopoly the players aren't even on the board. All the billionaires who own the property don't need to roll or land on anything. They have 100 other people that roll go around the board to collect their $200 and just use it all on rent and tax
No one has ever stood triumphantly at the game table and said "I have won Monopoly", it ends with a rain of hotels, a flurry of paper money, and a vicious kick to the shin from your sister. Let this be a lesson yo us all.
Isnt it insane that we invented some rules to run the world and even though its clearly not working, we are just going to keep the game going until everyone is dead?
Was thinking to myself the other day, why isn't society run like a computer program? Say someone writes a program and hands it down from one generation to the next. But the program is buggy. A programmer several generations down the line could access the source code and squash the bugs, but out of tradition, or some notion of respect, or some red tape set by the program's creator they don't. Maybe they want to, but their programmer friends tell them not to. So the program never gets better, generation after generation.
In the real world, you patch software. You fix bugs. You optimize. You beta test. You create new versions. You update. I don't see why society shouldn't work the same way. Why are we held hostage by buggy software that doesn't work? Why can't we have a Society 2.0?
The programmers who can change the program won't do it because they were born into a position where they benefit from the harmful effects. They tell all the users that if they work hard enough, they too will benefit from the harmful features. Enough users believe that drivel that there won't ever be enough pressure on the programmers to change it. The programmers know that it's harmful and unsustainable, but they believe that they will be dead and gone before the problems build to the point of affecting themselves. Or they believe they've programmed in a safety net for themselves so that they will never be affected.
Right now, the processor is overheating and the programmers don't care because they've allocated most of the processor time to themselves and can simply cut time for others to keep the processor just barely below the point of catastrophic failure. The programmers haven't been forcibly deleted by the users because the blame has already been put on the lowest level, most disadvantaged users.
It helps that there are so many bugs that are *very* simple to address, and then made incredibly difficult to actually fix. Defers time and energy away from other bugs.
I feel the same way about the 40 hour work week. It was the OS 100 years ago, but we're still using it? It desperately needs some upgrades to deal with the reality we're in now.
The game Monopoly was originally created by Elizabeth Magie as a way to demonstrate the injustice of the 19th-century capitalist system, which allowed landlords to accumulate wealth without having to do anything to earn it. Her game, called the Landlord's Game, showed how rent gouging and monopolies hurt ordinary people and how a land value tax could be used to create a more equal society. While the single-tax movement that inspired Magie's game eventually died out, her game continued to be played and tweaked, becoming the internationally famous game Monopoly that we know today. This origin story is significant to the subreddit r/collapse because it shows how the same exploitative economic forces that existed in the 19th century still exist today, with landlords profiting off of rising housing prices while ordinary people struggle to make ends meet. This is a reminder that economic inequality and exploitation are systemic problems that must be addressed if we are to avoid a collapse of our current economic system.
Also: although the tweet has the word “restart” in it, this is not referencing “the great reset” conspiracy theory. I just wanted to make it crystal clear that I am in no way endorsing that.
American Experience on PBS just had a really good episode about the board game Monopoly.
https://pbs.org/video/ruthless-monopolys-secret-history-wnxglj?source=social
Y’all forget that this already happened in communities across the U.S. Only a few communities are the exception, and generating revenue for the federal government.
I think the actual, deeper lesson of Monopoly is that game only really ends when one of the "losers" gets mad enough to flip the board, lunge over the table, and punch the "winner" in the face. Then, after a brief cooling-off period and some pudding pops, everyone agrees that it's a fundamentally terrible game that brings out the worst in everybody and it's not worth playing anymore, but (and this is key) you don't throw it out; you put it back in the game cupboard so every time you go to pick a game, you see it, remember what happened last time, cringe a little and say, "yeah, not that one."
These galaxy-brained executives and their corporate boards, where most of their companies exclusively rely on consumerism to function, in one form or another, have pressed and opted for broad economic policies that depress the wages and disposable income of... consumers.
It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for 'em. Literally cannot go tits up.
There needs to be a follow up game to monopoly where the winner of monopoly is the solo player as the “gov-corp” entity and the rest of the players are coordinating protests and riots. They have to fend off union and protest busting tactics. Their goal is to beat down the “gov-corp” and take back their freedom through coordinated efforts.
If the workers win, then you start a new game of monopoly. If the “gov-corp” wins, the cycle ends and you all get to be sad.
The infinite loop of monopoly into gov-corp symbolizes the infinite struggle to maintain a society that works for the people. The finite end of gov-corp is the descent and finality of the eventual and obvious oppression of the people.
I don't know if this post was created prior to the news, but the FDIC just stepped in and took control of Silicon Valley Bank! On top of that, more news has broken in the form of Wells Fargo denying customers access to their money.
Something huge is happening in the banking sector, folks. Keep your eyes and ears open.
This could be a huge ripple.
In real life the empty buildings can be borrowed against for a line of credit or somethings like that. Thats why we see so many abandoned holes and buildings. Because they genuinely aren't for renting.
Capitalism depends on cheap (or slave) labor for it to function as it's designed. If you really think about it, that is exactly what inflation creates. It is literally designed so that the few get everything and everyone else gets nothing but the crumbs.
You thought raising the wages to $15 would solve the issue... Instead the resulting inflation that has occurred made it feel like you are being paid less than you were before. Was it necessary? Yes. But capitalism will always strike any positive movement to fix the issue... Higher rent, higher costs all around until the equilibrium is back to cheap (or slave) labor.
Whenever I explain the stupidity of "rugged individual capitalism," I use Monopoly as an example.
It's a running joke that Monopoly makes even sweet ole gram-gram into a ruthless shark, and that's the game version! It has no real consequences other than losing bragging rights or the right to choose what's for dinner. In real life, losing the game means real suffering. It means starvation, lack of healthcare, homelessness, death.
What's even crazier is we joined a game in progress. At least in Monopoly, it's somewhat a game of strategy and skill. You all start on the same position with the same resources and use the same dice. In real life, the properties and utilities are already owned, the owners of those properties charge disgusting prices despite their already significant wealth in comparison to new players, and they can buy new rules. While we use dice, they get to select which space they land on. They are not subject to bad luck or terrible investments.
So what do people expect? If we have an inherently unfair competition over who can be the most ruthless, why does anybody expect anything but ruthlessness? If this is a game for survival of the fittest and we declare fittest to mean "biggest asshole," then how will our psyches adapt with each generation?
I watched a great documentary on monopoly with my grandparents a few weeks ago.
Apparently a woman invented a slightly different version of Monopoly to be a teaching tool for a different type of taxation (I believe it was called "fair tax").
The game was then played by people for fun by her friends and neighbors, with them making their own boards with slightly different rules.
Finally, one of those people sold their version of the game to Parker Brothers, and we have the version of the game we play today.
Form Wikipedia:
> The earliest known version, known as The Landlord's Game, was designed by Elizabeth Magie and first patented in 1904, but existed as early as 1902. Magie, a follower of Henry George, originally intended The Landlord's Game to illustrate the economic consequences of Ricardo's Law of economic rent and the Georgist concepts of economic privilege and land value taxation.
Nations like Pakistan laden with massive debt at risk of default along with war in Europe. Might want to start there. Add to that climate change and you can see it all come into focus if you watch closely.
Why are people so hung up on being sustainable? Life is not meant to be. Just ask the early life that excrete toxic (to them), killed everyone, but gave rise to the oxygen breathing life today.
Life comes in cycles. Old life died. New one arose ... until the heat death of the universe.
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What’s sad is that people don’t understand is that GameStop is literally changing the way the world economy is going to work for the better but people just don’t want to see.
Not satire, everything that has been happening with the economy has been pretty much predicted in the DD we are just relaxing trying to hand out golden parachutes while everyone else is freaking out
It’s not a scandal you just have too dig. Reddit banned our group from brigading and even mentioning it anywhere.
Edit: By group I meant a casual gathering of individual household investors sharing and disseminating information to find out what’s what
Fun fact: Mussolini used corporatism to describe fascism, which is capitalism in crisis.
What books have you read on the subject? You seem pretty confident declaring monopoly only happens with government control...despite capitalist economy and capitalist government not being mutually exclusive.
No, that's actually not what *either* of those terms mean.
Capitalism is when a society's economic activity is defined primarily by private ownership for the purpose of profit, using wage labor.
Corporatism is when a society's political power is organized on the basis of various corporate groups working together such as companies, unions, professional associations, etc.
A society could be both of these things, but corporatism isn't very prevalent right now with the dominance of neoliberalism.
Capitalism requires the state to administer and enforce claims to private property, and cannot function otherwise. All capitalist firms rely upon the state to do this for them.
Taken from the encyclopedia Britannica
Monopoly, which is the best-selling privately patented board game in history, gained popularity in the United States during the Great Depression when Charles B. Darrow, an unemployed heating engineer, sold the concept to Parker Brothers in 1935. Before then, homemade versions of a similar game had circulated in many parts of the United States. Most were based on the Landlord’s Game, a board game designed and patented by Lizzie G. Magie in 1904. She revised and renewed the patent on her game in 1924. Notably, the version Magie originated did not involve the concept of a monopoly; for her, the point of the game was to illustrate the potential exploitation of tenants by greedy landlords. Magie used the Landlord’s Game to promote a remedy for such exploitation—namely, the single tax on property owners, a leading social issue among those who criticized land speculation as a cause of economic injustice.
I haven’t played Monopoly since the 80s. What is the M currency here? It was £ on our UK boards. And it’s interesting seeing the American streets on the board, I’m so used to seeing park Lane and Mayfair as the expensive properties.
They can make a version where the bank prints infinite money and gives just enough to the broke players to go another turn so the game goes on forever.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Biosphere_Collapse: --- The game Monopoly was originally created by Elizabeth Magie as a way to demonstrate the injustice of the 19th-century capitalist system, which allowed landlords to accumulate wealth without having to do anything to earn it. Her game, called the Landlord's Game, showed how rent gouging and monopolies hurt ordinary people and how a land value tax could be used to create a more equal society. While the single-tax movement that inspired Magie's game eventually died out, her game continued to be played and tweaked, becoming the internationally famous game Monopoly that we know today. This origin story is significant to the subreddit r/collapse because it shows how the same exploitative economic forces that existed in the 19th century still exist today, with landlords profiting off of rising housing prices while ordinary people struggle to make ends meet. This is a reminder that economic inequality and exploitation are systemic problems that must be addressed if we are to avoid a collapse of our current economic system. Also: although the tweet has the word “reset” in it, this is not referencing “the great reset”conspiracy theory. I just wanted to make it crystal clear that I am in no way endorsing that. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/11nn69v/it_was_unsustainable_from_the_beginning/jbnz6gu/
The realism of Monopoly is marred by the fact that the people striving to own everything in the world *occasionally* have to pay income tax or go to jail.
They can also go bankrupt for real, so they must be small fish money wise
They can also just pay to get out, so I'd say it's pretty accurate.
In the late game, staying in jail is cheaper than landing on a property. So kinda realistic, actually.
Whenever I landed on Income Tax, I'd go full Monty Burns: "What do I pay these lawyers for?!" Haven't played, or watched the Simpsons for that matter, for a few decades though.
Monopoly is still Monopoly. The Simpsons is.. well anyway you tuned out at a good time.
When I was a kid playing this game, I took those two tax cards out of the community chest deck - even as a kid I was anti-high-taxes!
are you proud of quoting that?
Why are you *so mad*?
I'm not mad i just think if i was pathetic i would want to know
Say friend, who's the one blocking your flow ?
get off my nuts maybe
It's not like 'RISK' stopped us going to war after all.
All it ever taught me is that you can't hole up in Australia forever, the rampaging hordes will come for you *eventually*.
Yes it reminds us why agression is critical to not losing against the other players. The Dodo never understood that. So that game too shows us a side of ourselves.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYGa9KZOy7c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYGa9KZOy7c)
How about a nice game of chess?
Exactly. In real life the ultra rich never have to do either if those things
And just like in monopoly, only the unlucky rich people end up paying taxes or doing jail time.
Have you ever heard the notion that capitalism can take anything - even stuff critical of capitalism - and eat it up, change it, and sell it back to you? The Monopoly board game is a great example of that. [It was invented by a woman to demonstrate the evils of capitalism](https://www.huckmag.com/outdoor/sport-outdoor/the-hidden-world-of-monopoly-and-its-anti-capitalist-roots/).
She was a georgist, not an anti-capitalist, but anti-landlord. She literally wanted to abolish all taxes and nationalize land. Shoutout to r/georgism Edit: I described it wrong, it's more like slowly increasing the land value tax to 100%, so that the occupier of that land has to give back to the society for using that land.
all *other* taxes except LVT you mean?
Correct.
Well, Georgists also want Pigouvian taxes on negative externalities, e.g., carbon tax. If you do $100 of harm to others or society at large (e.g., via pollution), you oughta pay society $100 in taxes. Like LVT, they're efficient, effective, and fair. Edit: But one could argue that Pigouvian taxes are just a type of LVT or vice versa. There is a finite carbon "budget" that we can pump into the atmosphere before things go kablooey. One could argue that a carbon tax is just an LVT applied to that atmospheric carbon budget.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21550085.2023.2166342
Abolishing taxes is a bit silly, that's a great way of redistribution, and reducing inequality. But nationalising land I can get behind.
there's already social and legal precedent for it, too. we've set aside lands and declared them to be public lands in a variety of ways. people love our state and national parks and forest preserves, and for good reasons. the reason being, they're awesome. we could do just a half step, a tiny measure, a good start so as not to upset all the BAU centrists; legally strip all corporations from owning land. reconfigure it to some kind of lease or rental agreement that comes with a nontrivial cost. and force them to deal with their own pollution on said land.
If you wanna believe big hair dude on ancient aliens (lol), then the entire reason national parks even exist is via treaty with the aliens, they're "legal" abduction sites. LOL ... although. Capitalism being what it is (convert every square inch of dirt into a strip mall), I presently have no better explanation...
I for one believe him. He was my [favorite character on Babylon 5](https://i.imgur.com/W4F6y.png).
I've not thought about Babylon 5 in so long. It's worth a rewatch.
Taxation is one of the few non-lethal ways to yoke high-functioning psychopaths to the common good
True, taxes being non-lethal is a bit of a hindrance we should really fix.
The above description is a bit of a weird way to describe it. The Georgist position is that all taxes should be replaced with a land value tax as close to 100% as possible - the idea being that all non-LVT taxes are just indirect and less-efficient ways of taxing land value *anyway*, so might as well maximize tax revenue by taxing land values directly. The tax revenues would then be spent on public works and infrastructure, and all surplus would be disbursed as a citizens' dividend - or, as it's known nowadays, a universal basic income.
And in addition to being an elegant form of taxation, LVT is just a great tax: > Land value taxes are generally favored by economists as they do not cause economic inefficiency, and reduce inequality.[2] A land value tax is a progressive tax, in that the tax burden falls on land owners, because land ownership is correlated with wealth and income.[3][4] The land value tax has been referred to as "the perfect tax" and the economic efficiency of a land value tax has been accepted since the eighteenth century.[1][5][6] > ... > LVT's efficiency has been observed in practice.[18] Fred Foldvary stated that LVT discourages speculative land holding because the tax reflects changes in land value (up and down), encouraging landowners to develop or sell vacant/underused plots in high demand. Foldvary claimed that LVT increases investment in dilapidated inner city areas because improvements don't cause tax increases. This in turn reduces the incentive to build on remote sites and so reduces urban sprawl.[19] For example, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania's LVT has operated since 1975. This policy was credited by mayor Stephen R. Reed with reducing the number of vacant downtown structures from around 4,200 in 1982 to fewer than 500.[20] > LVT is arguably an ecotax because it discourages the waste of prime locations, which are a finite resource.[21][22][23] Many urban planners claim that LVT is an effective method to promote transit-oriented development.[24][25] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
>But nationalising land I can get behind. Just ask a native American...
Your point?
If you have to ask, you would not understand the explanation...
What makes giving the government all land a good idea?
It's not giving government the land. It's retaining the value of the land for the people, for public benefit not private benefit. Anything *on* the land built by people is private property but the land remains as a commonly-held good.
The best way to do it is more like a coop that owned by all members of society instead of the government. Were all members have a say in the land use and can vote, and you have a board of directors whose sole responsibility is to insure the wishes of the members are considered.
You literally just described government, voting, and zoning…
which is why it can't work. democracy is stupid when significantly more than half the populace are total fucking idiots
*nationalize (Merriam-Webster) : to invest control or ownership of in the national government.* Nationalizing all the land is *literally* "all the land is under government control and/or ownership".
Fair enough! Since the commenter I was replying to used the term "nationalizing." I thinking more about the general conversation about Georgism (also called the single-tax movement) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism Georgism doesn't espouse nationalizing land. It sees land more like air, a natural resource that shouldn't be anyone's property (i.e., in the modern property rights sense, in that if you own something you almost always have complete control over it - to destroy, modify, exclude others). Like the environmental movement's desire to tax processes that "use" the common good of air by polluting it, under Georgism land is inherently owner-less, common property and the state charges a use fee on anyone who wants to monopolize the economic potential of a parcel. In fact George included all natural resources in his concept of "land" including air, water, forests, fisheries. Another example of a natural resource held in common, but that the government charges a use tax on (at least in the US) are radio frequencies. In our current economic model we have a confusing mix - some natural resources are held in common while others are private property. Also, mostly you can do whatever you want with your private property, but sometimes you can't. I'm not defending Georgism, but I think it's an interesting premise. Many human cultures have a more Georgist view of land and other natural resources, although all of these (as far as I know) have much smaller populations and geographic scope than ours (many North American cultures, pre-Norman Britain, pre-Roman Germany, etc.) so the model probably doesn't scale. It seems the way of things that communal societies get conquered and ousted by capitalist, private-ownership-is-everything cultures =(
Thank you for the clarification!
> It’s retaining the value of the land for the people I think you are saying giving it to the government in a more complex way here. What would be the entity that owned it? A collective? I.e. the government?
> the entity that owned it Land does not need to be treated as a commodity. Who owns the clouds in the sky, or the wind, or the water in the sea? It is not necessary for the land to be owned by any entity. I find it honestly bizarre when you really think about it to just accept that someone actually could own part of the earth. This is especially true when you think about how that had to have come about. Someone just randomly laid claim to some land and said, "This is mine." But, by what right?
It already belongs to the government. Your land deed is worth less than the paper on which it's printed without the government choosing to enforce it.
This is the take one has when they're depoliticized from a true democratic process. It should be a state of, for and by the people, but we've never lived in that sort of place.
Something that is good for the whole isn’t always good for the individual. When society is based off the good of the majority you will have tyranny for each person. Private ownership ( with regulation ) is far better than a bureaucrat determining who can and can’t live in a place or a lawless madhouse.
A misrepresentation of a true democracy for the sole purpose of your despotic desire for private gains through anti democratic exploitation of your fellow man. Nice attempt at trying to make a spectacle of it in the form of a bureaucratic boogeyman though. You're the proto fascist petite bourgeois I presume?
Lol you’re going down this path? Hilarious. It’s almost a trope.
Private property isn't a right and is a miserable way to utilize resources and organize a just society. Small business owner right? Landlord?
nationalizing land is pretty damn anti-capitalist
I love when my favorite subs have crossovers. Also, thanks for the facts!
Heck, I will take the Georgist compromise! At least then the youngest generation wouldn't have been totally screwed out of homes in the time they have left.
Charles Darrow invented Monopoly. He just stole her idea and formatted it differently.
Monopoly wasn't invented by her, the other game was. The owners of monopoly had to bargain with her to sell it(she had already created a monopoly type game), and her price was that they would create (I think) 10 thousand and sell them also. Hers didn't sell well which is why no one knows about the landlord game
Recuperation is the term ([wiki article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics)))
[Bill Hicks on marketing](https://youtu.be/tHEOGrkhDp0)
That’s some serious truth. I see this as someone who works in the environmental field, so so true
"Nothing sells better on MTV than a takedown of MTV" - Mark Fisher ~~Starting to sweat a bit when all of my intellectual superiors start killing themselves because of the mental gridlock of late stage omnicidal capitalism.~~ NB: Sorry, 'unalived'. We aren't allowed to discuss human mortality at this point. Labour units don't have mortality, only quotas.
From Wikipedia
Clearly, the warnings were ignored.
Some people get it, once they are grown up. The difference is, most people start from zero, while a few start with hotels.
Until it was bought and repackaged, that is, the irony of which is deliciously explained in a Dollop Episode.
The first contradiction of capitalism. The economy requires growth at all costs and the rate of profit declines as more companies use more resources to chase the market opportunities. Eventually the only source of profit is to reduce your input costs and a primary one is the employees you're already stealing surplus value from. Depressing their wage and benefits further provides the growth shareholders demand, as does cannibalising smaller companies. In doing so the consumer base is alienated and loses the ability to demand what the monopolies are now charging a higher price for. The second contradiction of capitalism factors nature into the equation. The represented cost of production isn't the actual one because companies externalise the longterm damage they do to people and the environment. It's growth if they don't pay their taxes or save money dodging waste disposal regulations. Over time it's not only a demand-side crisis, but a supply-side crisis because the overall metabolic capacity of the environment is lost. Overfarming degrades the land and future yields are diminished unless greater amounts of chemical inputs are used, further degrading the land and the waterways the agribusiness isn't responsible for. Those two contradictions are the unsustainability of the system. They can't be resolved without removing the pure abstraction of commodities as exchange value and the layers of parasitism baked into corporations.
You're a good writer
That was almost a verbatim paraphrasing of Marx
Oh thanks, haha 😄
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Then they'd see I was hiding money under the board.
I never thought to be this sneaky. Thank you, I can't wait to play monopoly soon and have my soul crushed.
The original version (The Landlord's Game) had an alternate ruleset where players would pay taxes on the spots they owned and would all equally receive a dividend. The game ends when the players finally get bored of playing - because it would go on forever, with nobody going bankrupt and nobody winning or losing.
There's a drone flying above the board that puts a bullet in your head if you try to flip it, and every time you ask if the drone makes anyone else uncomfortable the other players call you a conspiracy theorist.
Yeah we’re nailing the board down. At a certain point during the game, Mac’s gonna get very pissed off because he’s not doing very well. He’s gonna try and flip the board over.
Eventually the table will collapse. It's already starting to crumble.
Yeah you don't understand the lessons of the game or the meme.
Modern day monopoly the players aren't even on the board. All the billionaires who own the property don't need to roll or land on anything. They have 100 other people that roll go around the board to collect their $200 and just use it all on rent and tax
*table flip*
No one has ever stood triumphantly at the game table and said "I have won Monopoly", it ends with a rain of hotels, a flurry of paper money, and a vicious kick to the shin from your sister. Let this be a lesson yo us all.
Oath
Rising housing prices that they are artificially inflating in the first place
Blackrock is buying up small communities in whole and then inflating the prices because they have the whole neighborhood locked down
Isnt it insane that we invented some rules to run the world and even though its clearly not working, we are just going to keep the game going until everyone is dead?
This is why i play my own games fuck their game But yes im frustrated by the rules every day, I prefer a guideline
Was thinking to myself the other day, why isn't society run like a computer program? Say someone writes a program and hands it down from one generation to the next. But the program is buggy. A programmer several generations down the line could access the source code and squash the bugs, but out of tradition, or some notion of respect, or some red tape set by the program's creator they don't. Maybe they want to, but their programmer friends tell them not to. So the program never gets better, generation after generation. In the real world, you patch software. You fix bugs. You optimize. You beta test. You create new versions. You update. I don't see why society shouldn't work the same way. Why are we held hostage by buggy software that doesn't work? Why can't we have a Society 2.0?
The programmers who can change the program won't do it because they were born into a position where they benefit from the harmful effects. They tell all the users that if they work hard enough, they too will benefit from the harmful features. Enough users believe that drivel that there won't ever be enough pressure on the programmers to change it. The programmers know that it's harmful and unsustainable, but they believe that they will be dead and gone before the problems build to the point of affecting themselves. Or they believe they've programmed in a safety net for themselves so that they will never be affected. Right now, the processor is overheating and the programmers don't care because they've allocated most of the processor time to themselves and can simply cut time for others to keep the processor just barely below the point of catastrophic failure. The programmers haven't been forcibly deleted by the users because the blame has already been put on the lowest level, most disadvantaged users.
It helps that there are so many bugs that are *very* simple to address, and then made incredibly difficult to actually fix. Defers time and energy away from other bugs.
I feel the same way about the 40 hour work week. It was the OS 100 years ago, but we're still using it? It desperately needs some upgrades to deal with the reality we're in now.
It's not "we"---it's the damn 1%-2% high-functioning psychopaths we keep giving birth to!
0.001%
Omg, did I include sll the serial killers too?? But...still enough of them to cause the Sixth Great Extinction
The game Monopoly was originally created by Elizabeth Magie as a way to demonstrate the injustice of the 19th-century capitalist system, which allowed landlords to accumulate wealth without having to do anything to earn it. Her game, called the Landlord's Game, showed how rent gouging and monopolies hurt ordinary people and how a land value tax could be used to create a more equal society. While the single-tax movement that inspired Magie's game eventually died out, her game continued to be played and tweaked, becoming the internationally famous game Monopoly that we know today. This origin story is significant to the subreddit r/collapse because it shows how the same exploitative economic forces that existed in the 19th century still exist today, with landlords profiting off of rising housing prices while ordinary people struggle to make ends meet. This is a reminder that economic inequality and exploitation are systemic problems that must be addressed if we are to avoid a collapse of our current economic system. Also: although the tweet has the word “restart” in it, this is not referencing “the great reset” conspiracy theory. I just wanted to make it crystal clear that I am in no way endorsing that.
Just for your own info, the tweet has the word "restart," not "reset." Your addendum is probably still needed for the galaxy brains around here.
American Experience on PBS just had a really good episode about the board game Monopoly. https://pbs.org/video/ruthless-monopolys-secret-history-wnxglj?source=social
Huh? The game ends when everyone is bankrupt *except one*. They're the winner, everyone else loses.
Yeah, this post is some real /r/im14andthisisdeep shit lol
I mean Monopoly ends in my family when someone flips out and threatens your life, not sure what the end of the game is like
Y’all forget that this already happened in communities across the U.S. Only a few communities are the exception, and generating revenue for the federal government.
I think the actual, deeper lesson of Monopoly is that game only really ends when one of the "losers" gets mad enough to flip the board, lunge over the table, and punch the "winner" in the face. Then, after a brief cooling-off period and some pudding pops, everyone agrees that it's a fundamentally terrible game that brings out the worst in everybody and it's not worth playing anymore, but (and this is key) you don't throw it out; you put it back in the game cupboard so every time you go to pick a game, you see it, remember what happened last time, cringe a little and say, "yeah, not that one."
Woohoo! I love casual Friday! Just sit back and watch the world burn in your jeans rather than dressing up for it.
#NYC
Monopoly actually has *affordable* properties...
Touché
"Capitalism isn't a zero sum game" - Idiots
Give basic income to all citizens; the game will continue on 4 ever.
Not when people w/ regular incomes are already phased out of the game!
It actually won't, this doesn't resolve all of the contradictions that doom capitalism. UBI is palliative care for a terminal condition.
Everyone will wait patiently in line for government cheese and be thankful for the bounty received.
Rich people who own hotels are not waiting for basic income. U been smoking too much zombies movies
Wow. Never saw it put so succinctly.
Itd be neat to have an add on to Monopoly that included being homeless and how difficult it is.
The difference is that we're being forced at gunpoint to keep playing, while the amount of money we have keeps going down and the rents keep going up
The fact that the game can be genuinely frustrating really highlights the point the game makes.
Monopolies were originally banned in the US for this exact reason. Because once you get too big, you own it all.
Shocking revelation
These galaxy-brained executives and their corporate boards, where most of their companies exclusively rely on consumerism to function, in one form or another, have pressed and opted for broad economic policies that depress the wages and disposable income of... consumers. It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for 'em. Literally cannot go tits up.
There needs to be a follow up game to monopoly where the winner of monopoly is the solo player as the “gov-corp” entity and the rest of the players are coordinating protests and riots. They have to fend off union and protest busting tactics. Their goal is to beat down the “gov-corp” and take back their freedom through coordinated efforts. If the workers win, then you start a new game of monopoly. If the “gov-corp” wins, the cycle ends and you all get to be sad. The infinite loop of monopoly into gov-corp symbolizes the infinite struggle to maintain a society that works for the people. The finite end of gov-corp is the descent and finality of the eventual and obvious oppression of the people.
Monopoly doesn't end that way. It ends with a board flip. Every single time.
... So major earthquake when reality hits that point?
That's why the game was born, to enlighten.
[Relevant post](https://www.reddit.com/r/SocialistGaming/comments/11co47i/if_you_stop_playing_then_you_lose_all_your_freedom/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
"Karl Marx has entered the chat"
I don't know if this post was created prior to the news, but the FDIC just stepped in and took control of Silicon Valley Bank! On top of that, more news has broken in the form of Wells Fargo denying customers access to their money. Something huge is happening in the banking sector, folks. Keep your eyes and ears open. This could be a huge ripple.
Wow I just saw that, crazy news
In real life the empty buildings can be borrowed against for a line of credit or somethings like that. Thats why we see so many abandoned holes and buildings. Because they genuinely aren't for renting.
Not if you could just print more Monopoly money.
Also if no one purchases any property everyone just keeps making more money and no one loses.
Always has been.
been saying this exact same shit about capitalism since i was a teenager. i'm 59
Capitalism depends on cheap (or slave) labor for it to function as it's designed. If you really think about it, that is exactly what inflation creates. It is literally designed so that the few get everything and everyone else gets nothing but the crumbs. You thought raising the wages to $15 would solve the issue... Instead the resulting inflation that has occurred made it feel like you are being paid less than you were before. Was it necessary? Yes. But capitalism will always strike any positive movement to fix the issue... Higher rent, higher costs all around until the equilibrium is back to cheap (or slave) labor.
Whenever I explain the stupidity of "rugged individual capitalism," I use Monopoly as an example. It's a running joke that Monopoly makes even sweet ole gram-gram into a ruthless shark, and that's the game version! It has no real consequences other than losing bragging rights or the right to choose what's for dinner. In real life, losing the game means real suffering. It means starvation, lack of healthcare, homelessness, death. What's even crazier is we joined a game in progress. At least in Monopoly, it's somewhat a game of strategy and skill. You all start on the same position with the same resources and use the same dice. In real life, the properties and utilities are already owned, the owners of those properties charge disgusting prices despite their already significant wealth in comparison to new players, and they can buy new rules. While we use dice, they get to select which space they land on. They are not subject to bad luck or terrible investments. So what do people expect? If we have an inherently unfair competition over who can be the most ruthless, why does anybody expect anything but ruthlessness? If this is a game for survival of the fittest and we declare fittest to mean "biggest asshole," then how will our psyches adapt with each generation?
Hurry up capitalism get to the singularity faster so the system can be rebooted.
All the poors go to jail and rich create their own socialism off of our prison labor.
I watched a great documentary on monopoly with my grandparents a few weeks ago. Apparently a woman invented a slightly different version of Monopoly to be a teaching tool for a different type of taxation (I believe it was called "fair tax"). The game was then played by people for fun by her friends and neighbors, with them making their own boards with slightly different rules. Finally, one of those people sold their version of the game to Parker Brothers, and we have the version of the game we play today. Form Wikipedia: > The earliest known version, known as The Landlord's Game, was designed by Elizabeth Magie and first patented in 1904, but existed as early as 1902. Magie, a follower of Henry George, originally intended The Landlord's Game to illustrate the economic consequences of Ricardo's Law of economic rent and the Georgist concepts of economic privilege and land value taxation.
Good news, the restart already started. Seems to be a big one, too
How so?
Nations like Pakistan laden with massive debt at risk of default along with war in Europe. Might want to start there. Add to that climate change and you can see it all come into focus if you watch closely.
r/im14andthisisdeep
Why are people so hung up on being sustainable? Life is not meant to be. Just ask the early life that excrete toxic (to them), killed everyone, but gave rise to the oxygen breathing life today. Life comes in cycles. Old life died. New one arose ... until the heat death of the universe.
What a feeble attempt at justifying a ruthless perverted interpretation of human nature.
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What’s sad is that people don’t understand is that GameStop is literally changing the way the world economy is going to work for the better but people just don’t want to see.
.....what?!?! 🤣🤣🤣🤣
It's satire. OP just forgot the /s at the end.
Even with the satire the joke is still a bit lost on me. And yes I'm aware of the reddit scandal last year
Not satire, everything that has been happening with the economy has been pretty much predicted in the DD we are just relaxing trying to hand out golden parachutes while everyone else is freaking out
It’s not a scandal you just have too dig. Reddit banned our group from brigading and even mentioning it anywhere. Edit: By group I meant a casual gathering of individual household investors sharing and disseminating information to find out what’s what
Also remember, monopolies only exist with government’s control.
Capitalism only exists with the government's control so that isn't very insightful.
I think you’re thinking of corporatism. Capitalism is the exchange of goods for money by private actors.
BS faux distinction of two capitalisms. Consolidation, uneven accumulation and monopoly are phenomena inherent to capitalism.
Enlighten me
Fun fact: Mussolini used corporatism to describe fascism, which is capitalism in crisis. What books have you read on the subject? You seem pretty confident declaring monopoly only happens with government control...despite capitalist economy and capitalist government not being mutually exclusive.
No, that's actually not what *either* of those terms mean. Capitalism is when a society's economic activity is defined primarily by private ownership for the purpose of profit, using wage labor. Corporatism is when a society's political power is organized on the basis of various corporate groups working together such as companies, unions, professional associations, etc. A society could be both of these things, but corporatism isn't very prevalent right now with the dominance of neoliberalism. Capitalism requires the state to administer and enforce claims to private property, and cannot function otherwise. All capitalist firms rely upon the state to do this for them.
Poetic!
The bank always wins
i have always pondered if we should have stuck to trade and barter the entire time and never relied on central banks
Basically the conservatives want to "restart the game" and socialists want to play a different game.
Taken from the encyclopedia Britannica Monopoly, which is the best-selling privately patented board game in history, gained popularity in the United States during the Great Depression when Charles B. Darrow, an unemployed heating engineer, sold the concept to Parker Brothers in 1935. Before then, homemade versions of a similar game had circulated in many parts of the United States. Most were based on the Landlord’s Game, a board game designed and patented by Lizzie G. Magie in 1904. She revised and renewed the patent on her game in 1924. Notably, the version Magie originated did not involve the concept of a monopoly; for her, the point of the game was to illustrate the potential exploitation of tenants by greedy landlords. Magie used the Landlord’s Game to promote a remedy for such exploitation—namely, the single tax on property owners, a leading social issue among those who criticized land speculation as a cause of economic injustice.
I haven’t played Monopoly since the 80s. What is the M currency here? It was £ on our UK boards. And it’s interesting seeing the American streets on the board, I’m so used to seeing park Lane and Mayfair as the expensive properties.
I think it’s just “Monopoly money”.
This board game is brilliant.
The end game is near.
They can make a version where the bank prints infinite money and gives just enough to the broke players to go another turn so the game goes on forever.
Hey, look on the bright side! Sometimes one guy gets to briefly own everything.
The Recent NPR podcast special about it was really fun to listen to