Elizabeth Magie was an early badass US feminist, abolitionist, and progressive tax activist; she wasn’t anti-capitalist, but advocated for universal land taxes that would redistribute disproportionate wealth back to the broader population.

She traveled around w/ Abraham Lincoln during the debates. She took out an ad in a newspaper auctioning herself off, to draw attention to the reality that white men were the only Americans with any meaningful power. She also invented some very practical things and also a game.

Lots of people know this already, “the Landlord’s Game,” the board game she designed in 1904.

It was supposed to teach everyone about the horror of land grabs, of how rents arbitrarily make property owners richer and richer and slowly drive renters into poverty and bankruptcy.

It was popularized some by a socialist economics professor teaching at @Wharton.

But it wasn’t really that popular except with socialists and Quakers.

It was a didactic game (from “the Economic Game Company”) about the ways that the grim mechanics of capitalism favor the player w/ a random and early lead, allowing them to grind other players into the dirt.

Not a popular game. Not until the Parker Brothers repackaged it, basically and said,

What if it’s *not* a sad story of how unregulated capitalism arbitrarily makes it impossible for most players to succeed?

What if you take the socialist professor’s “Landlord’s Game” — don’t change much, mostly the title and the premise —

and make it a great opportunity to fuck over your friends and family, the other players in the game.

Rebrand it “Monopoly.”

And I don’t know why I’m tweeting about this

except to say that if anyone thinks that the NYT story about the con man’s lies, fraud and tax evasion is some kind of lesson to those who follow him...

it’s a sad lesson that Elizabeth Magie learned.

Which is that somewhere around 1/3 of all humans think that this combination of early dice rolls and stumbling across the board represents something like acumen, skill, and superiority.

And more than that: it reflects a great goal they should get better at.

It’s a third of this nation that believes that they haven’t fucked over the other players as well as their leader, the guy who just keeps winning.

So, I dunno. I love you, @nytimes, and can’t even begin to imagine the insane work that goes into revealing the mechanics of this horrifying game and the loser who plays it.

But I also feel like it’s a familiar story, the story about stories, and what they mean to whom.

That it doesn’t matter what the system is or what’s revealed about it. The only thing that sells are the values by which victory is evaluated.

And for a few dozen million American maggots, those corrupt values were born corrupt, taught corrupt and celebrate corrupt.

Hate the player. Hate the game. But most of all, I hate the people that think it’s a good game to begin with.