Imagine a game of Monopoly…
My 12 year-old loves playing Monopoly. Unfortunately for him, a lifetime of playing the game has left my wife and I less than enthusiastic at the prospect of an afternoon spent indoors moving pieces around a board in a vain attempt at looking engaged. (We have many other failings as parents in case you were curious)
One doesn’t need to be genius to see after about 30 minutes who is actually going to win. The rich get richer fairly quickly, which is not a bad thing for a board game, and everyone else slowly circles the drain for an hour two before finally turning over their mortgaged properties with an almost audible sigh of relief. But imagine if the game allowed the person with the most cash to change the rules whenever they wanted to? Maybe she gets $500 every time she passes “Go”, while the rest of us only get $50? Or maybe she has a run of really bad luck, but instead of having to mortgage her properties to stay in the game, we all chipped in some cash and maybe mortgaged our own little slice of Marvin Gardens so she could keep her position at the top of the heap?
This game would be over pretty quickly, wouldn’t it? But of course our hypothetical overlord would be done with the game too, and where’s the fun in that? So she tweaks the rules just enough so that everyone gets to participate in the illusion that they still have a chance.
“No problem” she says as you land on Park Place with a hotel. “I’ll take all your cash, and of course you’ll need to mortgage your properties and hand ’em over, but I’m feeling really generous today. Against my better judgement I’m going to give you $1200”.
You realize this is a ridiculous way to play the game, but when you try and engage your fellow competitors in trying to shift the rules towards something a little more equitable, you are shocked when they vote to keep going. “Hey, she made the money on her own, why should you get any of it?” “You just don’t want to work hard, you should have stayed in school” “You should have gotten a job that came with better healthcare” “You shouldn’t have been born poor” “You should have made better life choices”
“She creates jobs”
Pretty stupid, huh?
It’s June of 2020 —and the real looting isn’t going on in our streets — it’s going on in brightly lit conference rooms, country clubs and the White House. We get positively apoplectic when we see a grainy video of someone dragging a $300 television through the broken window of a Walmart, while ignoring (or even championing) the billions that the Waltons have stolen and continue to steal from the rest of us. (If my tax dollars need to be spent on food-stamps and healthcare for your employees so 6 of you can have more wealth than the bottom 50% of Americans combined, you’re stealing from all of us)
We can easily see what a thumb on the scales does to a game of Monopoly, so why do we actively support this in real life?
