The Landlord's Game

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16261425

A while ago (1999) I made a "Micropoly" board game about the Microsoft Monopoly, with cards for various dot-com companies (Copyleft (L) 1999 Free Monopoly Foundation), using an xml file to define the cards and board and an ugly Perl script to render them with PostScript!

http://donhopkins.com/home/Micropoly/

>Update: I've written an ugly "openopoly.pl" Perl script, and a "micropoly.xml" data file, that describes the specifics of the game. The Perl script reads in and parses the XML database, and writes out PostScript and HTML to render the graphics and web pages. It embeds EPS files with images and cartoons in the PostScript file, and then runs it all through GhostScript, to render out PDF and JPG files with the printable images of the board. It currently writes out one HTML file with links to the small and large pictures of all the property cards, and soon it will write out a web page for each property, and link them all together, as well as an image map for the entire board. Most of the logos, cartoons, and other graphics haven't been put in yet, but the basic functionality for producing the game is there. This is work in progress, but here's a preview of the automatically generated web page index of properties, the full sized board micropoly-board-whole.pdf [1,672k], the paginated board micropoly-board-split.pdf [10,028k, sorry but I'll optimize the PostScript not to draw clipped images and it will reduce in size], and the printable cards micropoly-cards.pdf [5087k], as well as the micropoly.xml file from which it was all generated.

http://donhopkins.com/home/Micropoly/micropoly.xml

http://donhopkins.com/home/Micropoly/micropoly-board-whole.p...

http://donhopkins.com/home/Micropoly/micropoly-cards.pdf

The idea (which I never finished but encourage anyone else to pick up and run with) was to develop a fully skinnable parametrizable Monopoly compatible game template (or variants like Anti-Monopoly), that you could print out and glue onto cardboard, or even play online!

http://donhopkins.com/home/Micropoly/notes.html

Monopoly is essentially the original "Open Source Game" designed by Elizabeth Magie and shared among Atlantic City Quakers. Then it was illegitimately taken over and patented by a giant corporation. Parker Brothers' story about Charles Darrow was marketing bullshit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lizzie_Magie

There's also an interesting story about Ralph Anspach's decade-long "Anti-Monopoly" lawsuit:

http://www.antimonopoly.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Anspach

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Monopoly

https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/columns/straight-dope/ar...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_board_game_Mono...

>Also in the 1970s, Professor Ralph Anspach, who had himself published a board game intended to illustrate the principles of both monopolies and trust busting, fought Parker Brothers and its then parent company, General Mills, over the copyright and trademarks of the Monopoly board game. Through the research of Anspach and others, much of the early history of the game was "rediscovered" and entered into official United States court records. Because of the lengthy court process, including appeals, the legal status of Parker Brothers' copyright and trademarks on the game was not settled until 1985. The game's name remains a registered trademark of Parker Brothers, as do its specific design elements; other elements of the game are still protected under copyright law. At the conclusion of the court case, the game's logo and graphic design elements became part of a larger Monopoly brand, licensed by Parker Brothers' parent companies onto a variety of items through the present day. Despite the "rediscovery" of the board game's early history in the 1970s and 1980s, and several books and journal articles on the subject, Hasbro (Parker Brothers' current parent company) did not acknowledge any of the game's history before Charles Darrow on its official Monopoly website as recently as June 2012. Nor did Hasbro acknowledge anyone other than Darrow in materials published or sponsored by them, at least as recently as 2009.

That would only be possible if we had previously been using the labour and capital to produce those things at less than 100% efficiency. That's not what happens. Businesses will always have been trying to operate as efficiently as possible. When demand increases they either have to increase prices or increase supply. Increasing prices will mean that someone else doesn't get the good or service. Increasing supply will mean employing extra labour or capital that would otherwise have been used elsewhere. Either way, spending money doesn't cause total productivity to increase.

(Unless of course the Fed screwed up and put us in a deflationary recession. In which case, yeah, extra spending would help. But that's only if they screwed up. Normally, they have already optimised the variable you're trying to adjust. Adjusting it away from the optimum will just cause them to push it back.)

The difference is that when you give money to your children, you're not getting any goods or services in exchange. The transaction is making them richer, but you poorer by the same amount.

(Also, later when the children pay a mechanic the amount of total tax paid will be the same.)

Not only did they not produce it, in many places they (or the ancestors they inherited it from) actively stole it from the original inhabitants. e.g. The Inclosure Acts, Colonialism, etc.

In market socialism the the difference from capitalism is stricter controls on business ownership (i.e. businesses must be coops or something along those lines).