"Monopoly" was invented by a Quaker as an instructional lesson

mqbush

(142 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Thu Jun-19-08 09:33 AM
Original message

"Monopoly" was invented by a Quaker as an instructional lesson

We�ve all played the board game, �Monopoly.� The whims of the dice determine who lands on Park Place first, and consequently, inevitably accrues more and more wealth, without effort or wit, at the expense of the other players. The more money this purely lucky person extracts from the other players, the more hotels he can buy, increasing his effortless earnings by mind-boggling leaps.

It took the economic collapse of 1929, and many years of legislative struggles by progressives, to produce a manageable, sustainable, and humane economy after the robber barons of the first Gilded Age gutted America. (Of course, some will argue that it was WWII that sparked the economy. But wars DRAIN economies, as all the histories of all the warring nations of all the world clearly show. Sure, people had jobs in munitions plants. But they had earlier had WPA jobs, and were still poor people in a moribund economy. It was Keynesian economic reforms that transformed America.)

To be sure, there were pro-royalty, anti-socialism forces during the years of middle-class prosperity. But it took the one-two punch of the economically draining Vietnam War, and the rise of Richard Nixon, to shift power back to these proponents of financial elitism. The rest is the dreary history of descent into another Gilded Age. A worse one this time. In 1928, the top .01% of Americans averaged 892 times more income than people in the bottom 90%. In 2006, it was 976 times. (Source: The Nation, 6/30/08)

Wealthy apologists actually offer as a rationale the claim that they �earned� their wealth and should be free to spend it as they choose, and not have it taxed and spent by the government on other people who didn�t earn that money. This idea is astoundingly infantile and perverse. Members of our society, scarcely able pay their bills, chip in to make roads and schools and parks and libraries and armies and the internet and insurance for accident, illness, unemployment, natural disaster, old age, and on and on. This sharing by society�s members allows a life outside a cave or a nest in a tree. Anything and everything we have comes from that cooperative pooling of resources. These �rugged individuals� who amass astronomical fortunes have the luxury of dreaming up their bizarre rationales because they are freed from having to dig for grubs all day to get enough to eat, freed by the communal efforts of society. These �rugged individuals� derive all the benefits of a communal society, but they resent chipping in their fair share for the continuance of this profound evolutionary leap toward civilization. They want to live as parasites, pirates, marauders, stealing from society and, amazingly, they (at least pretend to) feel virtuous about it.

During the first Gilded Age, the wealthy hired guards to protect them from �socialists.� These �socialists� were poor, struggling lower-class people angry that for all their work they would die young from disease or occupational injury because they had barely enough to provide paltry basics for their families, while the financial royalists had staggering wealth that could do profound good, but which would be jealously guarded from doing so. In our second Gilded Age, the simple, descriptive term �socialist,� meaning a person in favor of the wellbeing of all the members of society, has been changed into something sinister and nightmarish. Now THAT�S a propaganda coup for the royalists. Isn�t it amazing how many people who would be so much better off with some socialist reform rage at the mere mention of the word?