100 people get together and they order a 100-slice pizza. The pizza arrives, they open the box and the first guy takes 80 SLICES. And if you try to say, "hey, could you maybe just take 79 slices - WELL THAT'S SOCIALISM!"
this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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Late Stage Capitalism
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There is no monopoly rule about murder that I know of...
Wtf, an income tax? This wicked game must be trying to make kids believing in welfare? What's next? Social security bullshit? Jeez..
You DO NOT NEED to stack the game at the beginning for this to happen. This ALWAYS happens because of rent. The game is NOT fair, because it allows those with a slight and random money advantage to charge rent, which inevitably transfers all the wealth from the other players to the richest ones, who start to inflate rent prices and extract all the income of the poorer people as rent.
That's the original point of the game as designed by the Georgists. Unless you tax wealth or multiple property ownership heavily, or you heavily regulate rent, the wealthy use rent to extract income from the other people.
Just get rid of the whole concept of rent altogether. It isn't needed.
Are you suggesting we should add extra rules to the game until we find stability and sustainability for all players?
it would be interesting if all players can agree on rule changes during the game. nothing too game breaking, maybe whenever a card is drawn players can vote on enforcing it or removing it, so as inequality increases, players would be more interested in rules that hurt the richest.
The full rules do exactly that. Read the Prosperity section of the rules of The Landlord's Game.
I'll try to remember to do that. It's been some time since I've played and even longer since I've read the rules. Thank you for that suggestion!
That lesson was always the point of monopoly of course:
The game is named after the economic concept of a monopoly—the domination of a market by a single entity. The game is derived from The Landlord's Game, created in 1903 in the United States by Lizzie Magie, as a way to demonstrate that an economy rewarding individuals is better than one where monopolies hold all the wealth.[1][6] It also served to promote the economic theories of Henry George—in particular, his ideas about taxation.[7] The Landlord's Game originally had two sets of rules, one with tax and another on which the current rules are mainly based.
Exactly. It was also designed to show that rent is the way you transfer money from the poorer people to the richer people and this progressively transfers wealth not because of merit but because of rent.
Of may surprise you to know that economists call attempts to use capital to create unearned income "rent seeking behaviour" and it's seen as harmful to well functioning markets.
You're more likely to know that economists see dominance of a market by one company (monopoly eg Google for advertising, Amazon for e-commerce) or by two (duopoly) as harmful and there used to be a lot of work done in regulating markets to make due companies played fairly with each other and with the public, but Reagan, Thatcher and the other neoliberals correctly said that the regulations held businesses back from making large profits enabling a lot of shareholders to become very rich indeed very quickly whilst the rest of us became steadily poorer. Very much like the board game showed us inevitably happens.
Ironically, The Landlords game was stolen by a larger company, so rebranded it with more character and got rid of the version without the unfairness; it was considerably less exciting because it made it hard for players to exploit a random small advantage to first steadily then rapidly extract all the money from the other players. I wish we were in that version of reality.
On the other hand, my news feed keeps offering articles from "people" telling me how much better it is to rent and it's a sucker"s game to own. Usually it's based on an overstated claim of convenience, but most recently one tried to use all sorts of hand waving to assert that it is also financially better. Extra rich that the author even admits he owns a lot of property that he rents out while simultaneously trying to make it sound stupid to actually own your own house (claimed he himself rented so that he's not "stuck" paying his own loan). I'm sure these are very sincere and smart people, why would they steer anymore wrong?
Don't know if it's real or my imagination, but it seems there are times when there's extra pressure to convince people that they want to eternally rent.
I think the only case where renting might make sense is if your rent is stupid low, and you can invest the money you'd be spending in something making stupid gains. But that's very unlikely to happen.
It makes sense if your job isn't very stable. For example, if you're brought into be a consultant on a project that will last a guaranteed 18 months, but probably not much beyond that, it probably doesn't make sense to buy a house. If you're a construction worker working on a major project, like a bridge being built somewhere, or the construction of a data center, but when that project is done there isn't likely to be any major local demand for your trade.
Even if you're hoping that something is going to be a long-term move, sometimes it's smart to start off renting until you can establish yourself. Like, if you're the best actor Wyoming has ever produced, so you're going to move to Hollywood to break into the industry, it might be smart to start out by renting rather than buying a house in LA.
The advantage with rentals is that your maximum commitment is normally a year, and often it's less than that. When you buy a house, you owe upwards of 5% to the agent. On a $500k house, that's $25k that just goes up in smoke as soon as the transaction closes. If you have to sell the house, move, and buy a new house 1 year later, you're spending $25k per year on agents fees. It would be difficult to come up with a rental arrangement that's financially worse than that.
Not that long ago you could just rent month by month, with first and last months rent as a deposit (Which they kept if you didn't give 30 days notice).
Im showing my age but having to enter a fucking contract for an APARTMENT is insane to me.
TIL. The version we played growing up had London based locations. Never realised the original had NJ based names.
Atlantic City, notably. We need to let them have it, they need it.
Same goes for other countries versions. Back in my land Monopoly board has streets from our capital city.
Played Monopoly with my family. Wife and 3 kids.
Wife started to dominate with some lucky rolls and some ridiculous mistakes from my preteen kids. It was a grim look, our only hope was to unite our lands and wealth. Become one unit that would hopefully miss all these fucking hotels and houses. We ourselves, with our combined strength had 75% of one row, with all the railroads. Also, some scattered houses on islands.
Once one person has the majority of the board, it's close to impossible to come back. Even with 3 players uniting with meger money and property. Had to make deals to survive extra turns for that one last grasp of victory.
It was ripped away from us. One roll we land on a hotel, ok. Our last stand. Sell all hardware, turn island properties. She had already taken the railroads from us to transfer her money across the planet.
Breathe.... we made it. One more roll, we had about 4 spaces to make Go and get our bullshit $200 wage. She laughs in our faces, she makes that with just slave labor railroad workers alone.
We roll 3. Land on another hotel. We have nothing left....the last gasp before the long dark. Save us from this monster.
I like the idea that Monopoly can teach the strength of unions to kids. To beat a mighty opponent we need to pool our resources.
It would be interesting if someone could take the same game, with the same properties, board pieces, etc. but turn it into a "union vs. management" game. One player started as management and already owned properties and hotels, the others were in a union and pooled their resources. You could have elements like the "union goes on strike" and the "management" player couldn't build any new hotels, but it meant that when the union players passed go they couldn't collect $200. And, for extra twists, allow a player to leave the union if they think that it's holding them back, and see what that does to the rest of the union and to management.
I't helps when the spouse cackles like a witch while holding all railroads.
That can make anyone want to unionize.
If you had picked the shoe you could pull yourself up by your bootstraps, but you wanted to be the dog. Do you know how many dogs are on the Forbes list of billionaires? None.
I make people hate me when I play monopoly. I hate the game as much as I hate the system it was originally meant to mock. So every so often, people I know will keep trying to get me to play.
Monopoly Pro Tip: buy everything you can afford, put as many of the little houses you can on it, but don't upgrade to the big pieces. When there are no more small pieces, you can simply bleed everyone dry.
I've had people literally flip boards in anger.
And every time I hear someone say "that's not fair", I respond "I know it's not, But 'what's fair' doesn't matter in capitalism."
Yes, I get a little preachy with it.
But hey, I've almost never been asked to play again by the same person.
You could get even more preachy, by printing out the original rules, and creating the "Public Housing" Space that is supposed to be around the corner of "Free Parking," similar to the "Just Visiting," portion of the "Jail" space.
Once all players except one have ended up in public housing, the "Prosperity," portion of the game begins, and it is likely to radicalize the most hard line capitalists out there.
I love how I tried to find a PDF of the rules for the "Landlord's Game" and one site it was on has everything beyond page 1 behind a paywall. I'm up to my ass in irony here.
Indeed. Well we know you definitely aren't Alanis Morriset. You know what the word means.
Wait. Americans have their own version of the monopoly ?
If by "their own version" you mean the original version, yes. The original version used Atlantic City, New Jersey place names. It's since been localized all over the world and there are also tons of specialty versions based on pop culture, hobbies, colleges, etc. The previous game it was based on, The Landlord's Game, used places from New York City.
I reject your reality and substitute my own
They have a Make-Your-Own-opoly version, too, so you can actually do that!
That's UNO, where arguing about the rules is encouraged. It's actually best to throw them out when you open the box so there is no hard evidence of whom is right
I didn't know before I saw this, but now that I have: of course they fucking do.
I don't particularly understand why this is so shocking: it's a game developed in America by an American company. There's cases of American Exceptionalism that are glaringly obvious but this ain't it. I mean this is the original patent:
And everyone knew that game was horrendous, so they updated it to something much more acceptable. They added a piece that looked like a dog.
It's not because you're lazy. It's because you're stupid, worthless and lazy. Go and inherit some money like reasonable people.
That's the point of the game.