Land Lines, Spring/Summer 2024
President’s Message George W. McCarthy, April 5, 2024

Revealing Who Owns America

In 1903, Elizabeth Magie, an East Coast office worker, introduced a game designed to illustrate the economic consequences of monopolizing land ownership. An avid follower of Henry George, Magie wanted more people to understand how unregulated rents enriched property owners at the expense of tenants. The Landlord’s Game was played in two rounds: the first involved buying, selling, and renting property, with the goal of making money; in the second round, players who landed on a property paid into a public treasury instead of paying the owner, showing how a land tax could undo the economic and social damage caused by unregulated land ownership.

But it also inspired, and was ultimately usurped by, a popular game with a very different message. Monopoly is a celebration of ruthlessness and greed that promotes unbridled large-scale land ownership. The popularity of Monopoly, now the world’s best-selling board game, helped normalize the idea that unregulated private property was sacrosanct.

More than a century after the invention of The Landlord’s Game, we still struggle to navigate the space between our cultural attachment to unfettered individual dominion over private property and our need to manage land to meet collective needs.

The Economist Briefing August 11th, 2018

The time may be right for land-value taxes

Beloved of liberals and economists, they have so far never caught on

ON A trip to New York in the late 1860s the journalist Henry George was puzzled. He found the rapidly growing city to be a place of unimaginable wealth. Yet it also contained deeper poverty than the less-developed West Coast. How could this be? George had an epiphany. Too much of the wealth of New York was being extracted by landowners, who did nothing to contribute to the development of the city, but could extract its riches via rents. The problem could be solved by a tax on land values.

George’s subsequent masterpiece, “Progress and Poverty”, sold more copies in America in the 1890s than any other book except the Bible. It spawned campaigns for land-value taxation around the world. It also inspired a board game, “The Landlord’s Game”, a precursor to “Monopoly”. The game was designed to show how property markets naturally tend towards monopolies in which one player can extract all the rent. But an added feature, missing from subsequent versions, was a tax on the value of land—ie, a levy that, unlike a property tax, does not vary with the number of houses or hotels built on it. The tax made it impossible for any one player to win but instead made them rich in tandem, as the proceeds of the tax were distributed between them.

The New York Times March 22, 2015

THE MONOPOLISTS

Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game

By Mary Pilon

What dyed-in-the-wool free marketeer invented this cardboard facsimile of real estate markets, and who owns it now? From whose ideas did it evolve? These are the questions Mary Pilon, formerly a reporter at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, proposes to answer in her briskly enlightening first book, “The Monopolists.” For decades the ­official story, slipped into every Monopoly box, was that Charles Darrow, an unemployed salesman, had a sudden light-bulb moment about a game to amuse his poor family during the Depression. After selling it to Parker Brothers in 1935, he lived lavishly ever after on the proceeds.

To trace how far removed this was from the truth, Pilon introduces Elizabeth ­Magie. Born in 1866, she was an ­unmarried stenographer whose passions included politics and — even more rare among women of that era — inventing. In 1904 she received a patent for the Landlord’s Game, a board contest she designed to cultivate her progressive, proto-feminist values, and as a rebuke to the slumlords and other monopolists of the Gilded Age.

Her game featured spaces for railroads and rental properties on each side of a square board, with water and electricity companies and a corner labeled “Go to Jail.” Players earned wages, paid taxes; the winner was the one who best foiled landlords’ attempts to send her to the poorhouse. Magie helped form a company to market it, but it never really took off. The game appealed mostly to socialists and Quakers, many of whom made their own sets; other players renamed properties and added things like Chance and Community Chest cards. Even less auspiciously for Magie, many people began referring to it as “monopoly” and giving it as gifts. Then in 1932, Charles Darrow received one with spaces named for streets in Atlantic City.

In November 1935, eight months after Darrow and Parker Brothers made their deal, the company persuaded Magie to sell them the Landlord’s Game patent for $500. The contract provided no residuals, but she hoped the famous game company would turn her “beautiful brainchild” into a popular way of disparaging greedy ­monopolists. The company had other ideas. Pilon has found long-lost documents revealing that it wanted ­Magie’s patent only to help “seal its hold on” Monopoly. It marketed the Landlord’s Game lackadaisically at best, and made sure Magie’s name had as little connection as possible to its lucrative blockbuster.

Darrow’s and Parker Brothers’ patent maneuvers kept most Monopoly lovers from knowing the game originated as “a protest against capitalism, not an endorsement of it.”

The Darrow-as-inventor propaganda held sway until Ralph Anspach, an economist at San Francisco State University, began to scrutinize it decades later. The rumpled professor, fed up with OPEC during the 1973 oil embargo, designed a game called Anti-Monopoly to help people understand how treacherously anyone who had cornered a market could behave. Like Magie, he believed “making money wasn’t a crime, but . . . monopolizing a product or industry and crushing one’s opponents was.” Anti-Monopoly players were “trustbusters” who earned points for breaking up monopolies and performing other acts of public service. Parker Brothers’ demand that Anspach cease and ­desist triggered his furious ­counterattack.

“The Monopolists” closes on a rousing or melancholy note. It measures the lengths to which one corporation has gone to sell the idea that a shrewd legalistic crusade was really a heartwarming parable — all part of its effort, as Anspach complained, to “monopolize Monopoly.”

CANADIAN HOMEBUYERS ARE IN AN UNWINNABLE SITUATION

The Coalition Against New-Home Taxes (or CANT) is a group of home builders, led by Matt Young of Republic Developments, who are asking all levels of government in Canada to lower the taxes on new homes. In some cities, these taxes — which include everything from development charges to HST — can account for up to 30% of the cost of a new home. This is bad for housing affordability and runs counter to our publicly stated goals. So to drive this point home, the group created a cheeky game called Taxopoly: The Unwinnable Game of Canadian Homeownership. (Credit to Blackjet for the idea and design.) I don’t think that the average buyer understands what kind of taxes are being levied on new homes, and so kudos to CANT for being a loud advocate for positive change. To learn more, sign their pledge, and/or email your representative, here’s their website: