Bilious Bogus Billionaires

Although she created it with good intentions, Elizabeth J. Magie royally screwed over American economic culture with her creation, The Landlord’s Game.

Her intention in 1904 was to create a game that could demonstrate the inherent failings of capitalism by allowing players to play the game under two different sets of rules:  One that provided for capitalist monopolies, the other that allowed for cooperation and mutual benefit.

People -- especially Americans -- being people, the version favored most by consumers was the one where a single player drives all the others into bankruptcy because that what there’s a clear-cut winner and the game could offer a sense of closure even if it meant disappointment for most people playing it.

And corporations being corporations -- especially American corporations -- the big game companies immediately began ripping off Ms Magie’s work, for the most part chucking out her cooperative rules to focus on a game of complete economic dominance, i.e., Monopoly.

This has directly or indirectly screwed over hundreds of millions of Americans as well as countless billions in other countries by teaching them -- or rather, by reinforcing capitalist propaganda -- that there is no possible economic system for the betterment of the planet and its people than the capitalist system, and that economic dominance in the hands of a tiny few is the optimum socioeconomic system.

Exactly the opposite of what Ms Magie demonstrated with The Landlord’s Game but wot da hey, right?

Instead of learning the lesson that a fair and equitable system could exist for the benefit of all, we’ve had the social Darwinism of Monopoly drilled into us.

We can’t see how we could do things differently.

And we can’t see how the current oligarchy is racing to economic disaster because they don’t recognize they’ve ginned up the game of Monopoly in the real world with cheat codes that make it unsustainable.

Here’s the problem in a nutshell: 
Most billionaires are wealthy only in the imagination of others.

I’m not talking about some moralistic relativism here, I’m being quite literal:  Most of what billionaires brag of as wealth doesn’t exist in any real form.

Rather, it’s a perceived wealth, a belief wealth, a purely imaginary wealth that has little if any basis in reality.

Lets say billionaire Leon Skum owns a gazillion shares of stock in Twaddle, a social media company.  If other people are buying and selling the stock among themselves at twenty dollars a share, he “owns” twenty gazillion dollars worth of stock.

But if Twaddle takes a sudden downturn -- even if it still functions as it had previously -- and fickle stockholders abandon it by selling shares at ten dollars each, then Skum has “lost” half his “wealth and is now worth only ten gazillion dollars instead of twenty gazillion through no fault or effort of his own.

How does this play out on the Monopoly board?

It doesn’t.

In Monopoly all the properties have fixed prices.  It is possible for a player desperate for cash to sell property they own at less than face value or for another player to jack up the price of a piece if property in order to sell it to another player seeking to build houses and hotels --

-- but the real prices remain immutable!

And the rents are anchored in the rules of the game, unchanging and consistent.

You can’t double the rent on Baltic by claiming its been gentrified and therefore worth more, you can’t slash the rent on Boardwalk if players landing on it now think it’s unfashionable.

Billionaires almost never make their personal money -- the money they buy personal property and yachts and private jets and willing sex partners with -- through the sale of actual goods or by providing an actual service.

Rather, they ask banks to pretend along with them that their gazillion shares of stock are worth so many dollars a share.  And the banks -- pretending along with them -- loan them money (which as a loan need not be reported as actual income) to indulge all their personal whims with.

And how do the billionaires pay off these loans?

Why, by increasing the value of their stock through any means available so they can borrow more to pay off the previous loans.

This is why capitalism resembles cancer: 
It must continually grow even at the cost of destroying the host.

It can’t be a symbiotic relationship where all parties benefit, it must be a parasitic one.

All these techbros who like to fancy themselves alpha male predators, no, they ain’t.

At best they’re tapeworms.

So when you read about Leon Skum being worth hundreds of billions of dollars, just remember it’s all bullshit.

He is high atop a shaky pyramid of ladders, and the only want he can keep climbing is by pulling loose ladders from the bottom and moving them up to the top.

Sooner or later he runs out
of ladders and the whole
Rube Goldberg edifice
comes tumbling down…

© Buzz Dixon

P.S.:  You want a really good, fun socialist game?  Baseball!  Baseball needs individual players to hit the ball and run bases, a wonderful opportunity for individuals to show what they can do and be rewarded for their individual efforts.

But it also needs all the members of the team helping one another in a variety of specialized positions to see to it that the team as a whole comes out ahead.  A person who isn’t a good hitter can still be of value to the team and contribute to victory by being a reliable component.

The problem we face today is that the Leon Skums of the world think that just because they got on base a few timers, they don’t need those plebian players who shag fly balls, pitch strikes, or pick off opposing team runners.

They think that if they get a walk and reach first base, then the next three players all hit singles, that they themselves are solely responsible for scoring the winning run and therefor all glory and gain should go to them.