Monopoly was originally created by Lizzie Magie in 1904 and called "The Landlord's Game." The object of the game was to demonstrate how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. She knew that some people find it hard to understand why it happened and to show people what might be done about it. She thought that if Georgist ideas (Henry George) were put into the concrete form of a game, they might be easier to demonstrate to people.[i]
Henry George inspired the philosophy and economic ideology known as Georgism, which is that everyone owns what he or she creates, but that everything found in nature, most importantly land, belongs equally to all humanity. Henry George’s first book, “Progress and Poverty: An inquiry into the cause of industrial depressions and of increase of want with increase of wealth” was self-published in 1879. It went on to become the best-selling book ever on political economy, and in the 1880s and 1890s was said to be outsold only by the Bible.[ii]
English ships carried negro slaves to America, and not to England or Ireland, because in America land was cheap and labor was valuable, while in western Europe land was valuable and labor was cheap. As soon as the possibility of expansion over new land ceased, chattel slavery would have died out in our Southern States. As it is, Southern planters do not regret the abolition of slavery. They get out of the freedmen as tenants as much as they got out of them as slaves. . . The essence of slavery is the robbery of labor. It consists in compelling men to work, yet taking from them all the produce of their labor except what suffices for a bare living. Of how many of our "free and equal American citizens" is that already the lot? And of how many more is it coming to be the lot?
We have not abolished slavery. We never can abolish slavery, until we honestly accept the fundamental truth asserted by the Declaration of Independence and secure to all the equal and unalienable rights with which they are endowed by their Creator. If we cannot or will not do that, then, as a matter of humanity and social stability, it might be well, would it avail, to consider whether it were not wise to amend our constitution and permit poor whites and blacks alike to sell themselves and their children to good masters. If we must have slavery, it were better in the form in which the slave knows his owner, and the heart and conscience and pride of that owner can be appealed to. Better breed children for the slaves of good, Christian, civilized people, than breed them for the brothel or the penitentiary. But alas! that recourse is denied. Supposing we did legalize chattel slavery again, who would buy men when men can be hired so cheaply?[iii]
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