Monopoly, then and now
Monopoly, the board game, has an enduring popularity, and like movie ‘franchises’, there are now more than 300 different versions. But the rules are essentially the same in all the versions: the downside of corporatism is being played.
Monopoly the game was invented more than 100 years ago, by Elizabeth Magie. It didn’t exist before Ms. Magie had the idea, knew what she wanted to accomplish with the game, and created the rules for all players to follow. We also know that it isn’t the only board game we can play. There are options available and Monopoly may well disappear with the advent of some new game the public takes to with fervor. (These days, perhaps Risk is more popular.)
The global economic system is a game
The world’s dominant economic system is also a game, with rules that change from time to time. There are many versions. Each one is only slightly different from the other and, like every other economic system in the procession of economic systems, our current economic system will certainly be replaced by something quite different. After all, mercantilism was replaced by the market economy, through a span of less than 100 years. Whatever new economic system emerges, it will seem to serve the needs of citizens better, and citizens will buy into it.
Any economic system is an invention, a game. The rules can be changed. In fact, they are constantly changing, although most of us don’t pay attention as one rule or another is modified slightly to shift the outcome of the game toward one interest and away from another. As the world moves toward democracy, so very slowly, rule-making moves slowly and uncertainly from the hands of the powerful and privileged into the hands of ‘the public’.
Organized games are technology
Organized games, including economies, are a also a technology. There are players, and playing pieces, coaches, and rules, and groundskeepers, and referees, and off-field general managers, and boardroom owners.
An economic system is a ‘process’, or a technology, like an assembly line, or an army, or a health care system. An economic system is a means to an end: it is not an end in itself. As a process, it is simply a complex tool made up of roles, rules, and relationships. It is useful as long as we can achieve more desirable ends with fewer undesirable consequences. Given that processes and technologies are constantly evolving, or being displaced by something dramatically new and different, it is absurd to argue that our economic system of the moment is destined to be unchanging and immortal.
There is nothing true, inevitable, or immutable about our economic system
There is nothing empirically or objectively ‘true’ or inevitable or immortal about any economic system. No economy is ‘natural’ and no economy was created by God and inadvertently omitted from the story of creation. (The economy we know certainly wasn’t the economy experienced by the Buddha, or Christ, or Mohammed when any of them lived.)
Citizens must not accept the myth that the economic system down through the ages has always operated the way we know it now and can’t or won’t ever be changed in significant ways. Citizens must not accept the myth that the system is almost as good as it can be and that big changes would be ruinous. In fact, big changes are inevitable. I would argue that they are immanent.
When I was young I watched professional hockey and football. I abandoned them in the mid-‘80s, when commercial television and advertising took them over. The rules changed, so that more and more advertising could be inserted. The tax provisions changed, so that professional sport could become big business. The payroll changed, so that marque players could be groomed as entertainment ‘stars’. The games eventually became simply a means to an end that wasn’t at all obvious in the play of the game itself. The rules were changed to favor the attainment of certain ends behind the game — ownership enrichment, advertising revenue for media companies, and increased entertainment spectacle for the masses.
Capitalism is not simply the most sophisticated expression of the rule-base market economy
In the same way, the operating rules for our economic system are constantly changing, and the economic system itself is changing in significant ways. Most recently, a bolt of lightning struck the trunk of our economic system in the last half of the 20th century, and we now have two economies, side-by-side. One is choking the other to death.
Capitalism is entirely different from a ‘rule-based market or demand” economy. Hedge-fund managers, currency traders, and asset-management firms exist inside a different economic system than does the neighbourhood store owner, or professional, or construction worker, or energy company President. Capitalism is not the most sophisticated manifestation of the rule-based market economy. Capitalism is the cancerous tumor that has metastasized out of the rule-based market economy and is going to kill the bearer if it isn’t treated.
Capitalism has fatal defects
Our future well-being does not lie with capitalism, which has a number of defects. These defects will be fatal for capitalism. They may also be fatal for humanity.
Our current economic system encourages waste. Waste management has been economized. Waste is now calculated as a contribution to a nation’s Gross Domestic Product. Canada would abandon a carbon tax that discourages waste and subsidize carbon capture and storage that condones waste. By this calculation, more prisons and more trash represent more economic activity.
Our current economic system has pivoted from production to consumption, and (generally) shifted from the production of more durable goods (good design, material, production) to the production of disposable goods (cheaper, less long lasting, needing to be replaced more often). We have moved from an economy founded on the production of goods, to an economy founded on the provision of services, to an economy focused on providing experience (including the ‘experience’ of being influenced).
Our current economic system has moved from ownership/stewardship to paying ‘rent’ on a recurring basis.
Our current economic system has moved from short supply chains and few ‘tolls’ to long supply chains and many tolls. (Tolls are very similar to rent.)
Our current economic system has moved from general competence and agency to general incompetence and fatalism.
Our current economic system encourages ‘full employment’ and discourages productivity.
Our current economic system is driving rapidly increasing income disparity and concentration of wealth, which eventually results in privation and social unrest/upheaval.
Our current economic system is undermining our current systems of self-government as economic actors escape the capacity of social institutions to ‘train’ them.
Imagine what may be
What lies ahead is not more of the same. It will not be what was familiar to us in the past. Imagine what may be.