Monopoly is Anti-Landlord Propaganda

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I like to make Monopoly the least enjoyable possible; buy every plot I land on, go to jail, start building houses. Because the experience of Monopoly should be watching one asshole, sitting in jail, collecting all your money, and loosing none of theirs.

Hate it when capitalism subsumes it's own criticisms into itself

My partner used to collect Monopoly editions before we got married. We have 17 versions of the game. I bought him a vintage edition from 1942. There was a metal shortage because of WWII and has wooden pieces instead of the usual metal figures. I also have a bizarre love of the game because when I played it with my family as a kid all of us cheated in different ways. I was good at dropping dice, my brother palmed bills to take extra cash or pay less, my dad hid and slid around property cards, and my mom was so good at just straight up lying about everything that was happening that she could manipulate us into doing what she wanted. My parents introduced the game thusly, "Okay, boys. This is a game about the evils of unchecked capitalism and we're all competing to be the ultimate supervillain. The number one rule is no matter what, everyone loses."

Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would *critique capital end up *reinforcing it instead. - Joyce Messier, Disco Elysium.

It's honestly kind of thematically appropriate the McDonalds monopoly cross-promotion turned out to be a huge scam

Junior board game club member: "What if someone wants to play Monopoly?" Senior board game club member: "We ask them politely, yet firmly, to leave."

I was just playing Vincent Van Gogh Monopoly in Dutch with my family. It's funny that instead of Community Chest, they had the Artists' Union, and a lot of the cards were like, "You finally sell a painting!" and "Your parents gave you money" and stuff, like you were a starving artist, that also owned property, which were actually paintings.

I once played a game of monopoly where one guy kept bragging about how much better at the game he was than everyone else, so we pooled our resources and wiped him off the board.

As the owner of a tabletop game store who has a bachelors degree in Political Science this video couldn’t possibly be more in my wheelhouse. Absolutely fantastic. More people should watch this as far far too many people completely misunderstand the whole point of the game.

I was watching The Christmas Carol today and it was quite jarring in relation to the current strikes and m usk making the few workers left at twitter work 80 hour weeks. As Scrooge is seen as horrible for overworking and paying Bob Cracket poorly, it is seen as obviously wrong. Yet today the newspapers and right wingers shout how lazy nurses are, after clapping them a year ago, how not being able to work more hours is a sign of freeloading weakness. Dickens would be the pope of Wokeness if he wrote Christmas Carol today.

Was not expecting a connection to Georgism. Neat! Edit: Unpaused the video and the next line was about how the 5% of us who do know of Henry George are obsessed and I have never felt so called out in my life. Lmao.

So how I've always read georgism, and heard it talked about is that the Land Value Tax isn't based on just the value of the empty plot of land. Say you have an empty plot of land in the middle of London (unlikely but bear with me) everyone would want to develop properties on that land, either for say shops or people to live etc. so the value of the land is very high, especially compared to another hypothetical piece of land you own in the rural Scottish Highlands. But now suddenly a metropolis forms in the Highlands, right around your plot of land, and now the land is worth just as much as your plot in London is. The land value has changed, and therefore so has the Land Value Tax. This means that you can no longer buy up land outside of growing cities and without lifting a finger see your investment grow and grow to then sell it for huge profit, instead the land being developed around it means you have to pay more and more taxes, so to make profit of the land you need to have it developed. This makes a Land Value Tax very useful in cities where land speculation is getting in the way of building more housing for people who want to live there, because nowadays it is normal to mostly pay taxes on the properties on the land (at least where I live) so speculating with empty land or just having it sit there and become more valuable is essentially free. This increases the prices for either the council to build council housing, or private developers who will then want to ask higher rents as the land they bought was more expensive. Essentially a LVT encourages the efficient use of land, and isn’t static. Or to use your example: instead of paying the $20 tax for an empty plot of Illinois Avenue, you would pay a lot more based on how developed the surrounding areas are (so potentially how many houses are built on the yellow and orange neighbourhoods). So if you don’t have a complete set and you can’t build there, because you only bought it so that your friend couldn’t complete the set and build houses, it might become a thorn in your side, where you actually have to pay more in LVT than you get in rent. This is encouraging you to sell it off to that friend so that it is no longer costing you money, meaning they can now build houses there. What makes a LVT great because of this is that not only does it give the community the tax to use as it sees fit and reinvest in itself, but it also means that land has to be adequately used, and landlords can’t make money just by sitting around. They have to build or maintain houses, or find people who want to open shops there and therefore actively contribute to the development of the community. (which is nice when you have an ongoing housing crisis) Now maybe that isn’t the way Henry George did his LVT, but this is the way I know LVT and how my city is looking to use it in the coming years (I’m an assistant to one of the parties in the city council here). Personally I still think it is a bandaid on the larger issue of capitalism, but probably nonetheless an improvement over what we do currently, which is mostly a property tax.

Funny to think that when you find yourself hating monopoly it means you're playing right.

My favorite game of Monopoly I’ve ever played was with a group of friends, one of us was on her way to winning the game, so me, my best friend, and the sisters of the winning player all decided to work together to put her out of business, and we ended the game peacefully coexisting lmao.

Couldn't the conclusion be: the main difference between monopoly and real live is the ability to choose to play the game or not. And we should maybe channel that anger into forcing changes, that gives us that choice in real live too.

my mom worked as a scale operator at a rock quarry for decades and the company commissioned their own licensed monopoly version for an anniversary ages ago. i think the company had maybe 50 employees at its height? the most niche monopoly collab i could imagine.

I heard about this story a little bit ago and it suddenly made sense why monopoly was so awfully designed. It was specifically designed that way to be a critique of capitalism.

"This would only result in the owner of Ian Wright having to hand you $20" is not a sentence I expected to hear today.

Lizzie Maggie might be happy to know that variations of Monopoly are being used in sociology classes to teach about inequalities. There's a version to teach about economic inequality, a version to teach gender inequality, and many others. They use the standard game that you can buy in the store, but have rule changes. For some of them, the teacher has to make up a few special cards. So, Mrs. Maggie's work is still being used for something good. BTW, the most unusual Monopoly game I own is Pythonopoly, a Monty Python version.