<aside> 💡 About
If you sense something is off in our economy in the US, you’ll probably get something out of this post. It’s a bit of a personal journey where I’m trying to answer some of my own questions.
Let’s begin.
Which begs the question through all this haze…what is fundamentally broken?
This is a zillion-dollar question to which a single answer would discredit the respondent who fell for such a framing. But living in CA, I think I see a clue.
CA’s fiscal dysfunction likely has many causes. But the output is plain to see — it’s a state that gives preference to building wealth through capital appreciation instead of labor and the real estate market has internalized that logic. But real estate, in particular, land should be considered a reserved word to use a coding analogy. Thinking land is just another form of capital, like a computer or factory is a subtle but profound error.
To understand why, we will journey back to the late 1800s to meet the economist and philosopher, Henry George.
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<aside> 💼 The Principles of Georgism
The primary way we will learn about Henry George’s framework is through a book review of George’s seminal work Progress and Poverty (1879). Before diving into that let’s set the table with Wikipedia.
With that bit of background, we will now turn to a book review which is less of a review and more of a Cliff Notes to Progress and Poverty. The anonymous author of the review submitted it for a contest. It shines in its thoroughness, clarity, and how it weaves in other sources to enrich the context.
I encourage readers to read the full review (I haven’t read the book itself but that would obviously be recommended). But in fractal appreciation of time and priorities, I hope you find this summary of a review of a book to be helpful. I created it as a personal reference because I’m sure I will want to revisit them as I assimilate the ideas into my broader understanding.
Moontower Refactors Lars Doucet’s Review of Progress & Poverty
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<aside> 📎 Learn More
On Distributism (a close cousin to Georgism)
Extra:
<aside> 🎲 The Monopoly Connection
In 1903, Elizabeth Magie applied for a patent for what would later be known as "The Landlord's Game," which was granted in 1904. The game is played on a board that is strikingly similar to the modern-day Monopoly board, where players move around a track, taking ownership of properties and charging rent to those who land on them. The Landlord's Game was originally designed to demonstrate the damage that a system allowing the monopoly of land ownership can cause, and to highlight how some of that damage can be avoided with the use of land value tax, as Georgism dictates.
The game existed in two separate versions.
The first version is essentially modern-day Monopoly, where players move freely around the board, acquiring as much property as possible and grinding other players down to the point where they are forced to sell their own lands. The winner is determined by who ends up with everything at the end. This version was supposed to represent the current system that Americans were living under, and the goal was to show how horrible a system like this can be for everyone except the person who ends up with the monopoly.
Once the players had been subjected to the drudgery of the first version of the game, Magie would introduce the second version of the game that followed Georgist principles. The anti-monopolist, Georgist version of the game not only showed that land tax would prevent one person from running away with everything and leaving all the others destitute at the end, but it also had a more cooperative end goal, with the win-state being when the player with the lowest monetary amount had doubled their original stake.
If it's not clear already, "The Landlord's Game" is the Monopoly that we all know today. However, you may not have heard of Elizabeth Magie before today. She is not credited as the original designer, and until the 1970s, her design was entirely lost to the public eye. But how did this happen? Enter a man named Charles Darrow.
[This is excerpted from the video version of Why does everyone hate Monopoly? The secret history behind the world’s biggest board game (Dicebreaker)]
Check out the rest of the video to learn the controversial and impossibly ironic history of the Monopoly game you grew up with.
Learn more:
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