IF SOCIALISTS UNDERSTOOD POLITICAL ECONOMY, THEY WOULDN'T BE SOCIALISTS.

Monopoly^(TM) started as a manifesto for Henry George's single tax, and it has long been misunderstood by people who would like to scold us for our selfishness.  "And how is it that a game conceived as socialist propaganda becomes a metaphor for competitive capitalism that inspires refinements to keep players engaged and involved?"

The latest such scold is longtime Ohio politician Nina Turner, once a regular on MSNBC's Ed Schultz and Chris Matthews programs.

She often feuds with libertarians about "Medicare for All," minimum wage, and other economic policies.

This week, she tweeted the following: "There's literally a children's board game that demonstrates that 'free-market capitalism' always leads to one person controlling everything."

I think those MSNBC hosts brought her on because she was colorful, not because she was the sharpest knife in the drawer.  The article reviews that history of the game, originally "The Landlord's Game," before getting to the difficulties of one person ever gaining control of everything.

As such, the rules and game mechanics don't exactly undermine the legitimacy of the capitalist system. As most people know from playing the game—which is weirdly popular, despite being somewhat unrewarding at both casual and advanced levels of play—Monopoly involves rolling dice, moving game pieces onto game spaces, buying property, and collecting rent. Players earn more money from their properties if they also own neighboring spaces and then develop them. There are gains to be had from trading properties with other players, but market mechanisms are mostly absent.

For instance, the amounts of money earned by landing on spaces is prearranged by the game's rules. In a free market, a landlord might charge more or less in order to entice renters and compete against rivals; in Monopoly, rents are set in stone. If anything, this is an argument against government-imposed rent control.

The fact that players must go bankrupt, one by one, until only the game's winner remains is a function of the game's design, not of capitalism. Indeed, this mechanic is actually so poorly developed that games of Monopoly often end well before this point is reached: People frequently quit the game because it takes so long. Even under conditions artificially engineered to reach an end-state where "one person controls everything," per Turner's description, the game often doesn't work out that way.

So much for the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation.

That the game does not have to have an end raises the possibility that many games will not end. So, also, can it be with business competition, whether as taught in the textbook or as observed in industries without strong scale economies or network externalities. With sufficiently many players, the pattern of initial ownership of railroads, utilities, and properties can be one in which no player acquires a monopoly in the first few trips around the board, and no proposed trades of properties (Boardwalk for Kentucky, Mediterranean, and $100) are mutually satisfactory. The resulting infinite loop is loosely a competitive equilibrium, although the game loses realism in that no housing gets built.

Although people have modified a number of the rules (payments directed by cards go into a pot gathered by the next player to land on Free Parking) I know of no local variation in which individual properties can be improved.  Even the combined intellect of all those Socialist Advocates has not produced a local variant in which there's a General Crisis of Accumulation affecting one of the players.