Monopoly

“What kind of society isn’t structured on greed? The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm; capitalism is that kind of a system” — Milton Friedman

James Poniewozik recently wrote about the Game of Monopoly in Time magazine. He writes, “If you want to understand the American attitude toward capitalism, look inside your hall closet. There’s probably a Monopoly game in there somewhere. Monopoly is the most popular board game in history, with more than 250 million copies sold. You may never have taken a real estate seminar or cracked an economics textbook. But if you grew up in an American home, and at some point it rained, you played Monopoly.”

“Smarter writers than I have tried to figure out why Americans resist the regulation of business and markets, often even when we would personally stand to benefit from that regulation. But you could do worse than to start with the fact that for more than 70 years, we have played a game whose object is to corner a market and beggar our neighbors. Every year pundits decry video games like Bully or Grand Theft Auto, yet our first introduction to one of business’s most predatory, illegal practices is through a widely loved game with adorable doggy and thimble pieces. It’s as if someone had invented a children’s board game called Racketeering or Usury.”

Ahhh… Monopoly… I loved it as a kid. I can’t wait to play it with my children some day. NPR gives a full history with their Present at the Creation series. “The students who played the game (the original Landlord game which Monopoly is based) made some significant adjustments. They gathered adjacent properties into groups, and created the opportunity to build on properties and charge higher rents when one player owned all the spaces in a particular group, giving birth to the key concept in today’s game: the monopoly.”

Andrew Leonard at Salon.com gives his view, “Let us reflect, for a moment, upon the true meaning of the game Monopoly. The goal is to amass property, control railroads and utilities, drive up rents to the maximum possible and, ultimately, force your opponent into bankruptcy.”

“It is a wondrous thing, this game: the raw and bloody beating heart of capitalism itself, a primer explaining in the simplest possible terms just what it means to exploit resources and extract surplus value from people who aren’t as quick (or lucky enough) to grab the best slice of real estate as you are. Is it any wonder Monopoly is the most popular board game ever? It’s the real thing, the stuff of America itself. It is, and always has been, a giant advertisement for an intrinsically commercial way of life.”

It all sounds so horrible for children… but is it? Amass property? Drive up Rents? Grab the best slice of real estate? Make money? To me it really just sounds like a long term financial plan. More ramblings on real estate in another post. I’m late today… need to pass Go and collect my $200.