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While American mythology lauds fair competition and self-made heroes, the reality is that our system of inheritance creates unfair competition and makes it particularly challenging to be a self-made hero. A key aspect of the inheritance problem is the disparity it has created between white and black Americans.

After the end of slavery black Americans owned about .5% of the total worth of the country. This is not surprising: most blacks had been property before this date. They did not have wealth because they were wealth. In 1990 things had had improved for black Americans—they now own about 1% of America’s wealth. This is not surprising—they started with little or nothing, whites received a bounty of governmental gifts, and blacks were systematically denied these gifts and restricted in their opportunities to earn their own way. While most of those in positions to address this matter must be fine with it, if you believe in fair competition and equality of opportunity, then consistency requires that you also believe that this problem needs to be addressed.

Condensing history, white people  have enjoyed numerous advantages gifted to them by the state. The Homestead Act of 1862 provided gifts of land that went mostly to white people. This land was taken, in large part, by the 1830 Indian Removal Act. Compensation was also paid to white slave owners after the civil war, but the 40 acres and a mule remains an empty promise to this day.  The 1935 Wagner Act gave unions the ability to engage in collective bargaining, and these unions were a great boon to white workers. But it permitted unions to exclude non-whites, which they generally did to the detriment of black Americans.

The Federal Housing Administration’s programs allowed millions of average white Americans to buy homes, while excluding black Americans. The national neighborhood appraisal system tied mortgage eligibility to race. Integrated communities were defined as being financial risk and ineligible for home loans—something now known as “redlining.” From 1934 to 1962, the government backed $120 billion in home loans with 98% going to whites. Lest one think that that things are significantly different now; black and Latino mortgage applicants are still 60% more likely than whites to be rejected—even controlling for factors other than race. One common response to such assertions is that while past racism was bad, the past is past. While this does have rhetorical appeal, it is fundamentally mistaken: the past influences and shapes the present. One obvious way this occurs is through inheritance: the wealth accrued from slavery and from state handouts to white people have been passed down through the generations. This is not to deny obvious truths: some white people blow their inheritance, many white people are mired in poverty, and there are rich black Americans. The problem is a general problem that is not disproved by individual exceptions.

Because of these policies and prejudices of the past, a representative white family today has, on average, about eight times the assets of a representative African American family. Even if families with the same current incomes are compared, white families have over double the wealth of Black families. A primary reason for this is inheritance.

Inheritance enables a family to pass down wealth that can be used to provide competitive advantages such as funding education and providing starting money for businesses. It also helps people endure difficult times, such as the current pandemic, better. As such, whites enjoy a significant competitive advantage relative to blacks that is unearned: they simply inherit this advantage. The advantage is also, as noted above, based on explicitly racist and discriminatory policies.

Some have called for reparations for these past injustices and I certainly agree with this notion. However, there are numerous obstacles to this approach. One stock objection is that reparations would take resources from living people to give them to other living people based on injustices committed by people who are now dead. While this objection can be countered, an easy way to get around this objection, and many others, is to adopt a plan focused on heavily taxing inheritance and using the revenue to directly counter these past (and present) economic injustices.

To win over consistent conservatives, the resources should be used to enhance the fair competition they claim to believe in. Examples of how the resources should be used include addressing funding inequities in education, addressing infrastructure inequities, and addressing disparities in mortgages. That is, providing people with a fair start so they compete in the free market beloved by conservatives. Obviously, once the historical racial disparities have been addressed and competition is truly fair, then the resources can be fully switched over to address general economic inequality that arose from other past economic injustices.

When marketing the idea to conservatives, the emphasis should be on how people are now benefiting from what conservatives claim to loath: unearned handouts from the state and unfair advantages provided based on race by the state. One can assume that people with such professed values will support this idea—otherwise one would suspect they are inconsistent or perhaps even racists. The proposed plan would help remove these unfair and unearned handouts to enable the competition to be reset. To use the obvious analogy, this would be like a sports official seeing people cheating in a track relay race by getting an unfair head start and using bikes. The official would be getting everyone to the same starting line, taking away the bikes and restarting the race for a fair competition.

This proposal has many virtues, but perhaps the greatest is that it allows for past economic injustices to be addressed in a painless manner: nothing will be taken away from any living person for what a dead person did. Rather, some people will receive significantly less of an unearned gift. As such, they are not losing anything—they are simply getting less of something they do not actually deserve. While some might profess pain at this, that would be an absurd response—like getting a free cake and whining because one did not get a thousand free cakes simply for being born.

As always, the devil is in the details. As noted in other essays, I am not proposing that inheritance be eliminated, nor am I arguing in favor of the state taking your grandma’s Hummel and assault rifle collection and giving it to a poor family. The general idea is that inheritance should be taxed, and the tax rate should be the result of careful consideration of all the relevant factors, such as the average inheritance in the United States. The plan could also involve increasing the tax rate gradually over time, to reduce the “pain” and thus the fervor of the opposition. In any case, a rational and fair proposal would take considerable effort to design—but would certainly be worth doing if we want to be serious when we speak of fairness and opportunity in the United States.

 

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Representative Ocasio-Cortez, best known as “AOC”, was called disgusting, crazy and dangerous by Representative Yoho. He was apparently upset because she expressed agreement with the plausible claim that poverty is linked to crime rates in New York City.  As Yoho walked away from AOC, he was overheard calling her a “fucking bitch.”

I am not going to rush to AOC’s defense like a knight in shining armor; she is an able champion and can slay her own dragons. In response to this insult, she displayed strength of character, courage, and a concern for others. As such, she stood in stark contrast with President Trump, who responds to even just criticism with an unbalanced display of weakness, dishonesty and self-obsession.

As should be expected, people did step up to defend Yoho and attack AOC. As would also be expected, many of these appeared on Facebook. One interesting example involved making the claim that AOC and her supporters think that calling people racist and sexist is acceptable. This was juxtaposed against Yoho just using “naughty words.” The closing point was to sarcastically note that AOC had surely never used such words. There is a lot going on in there.

As a rhetorical tactic, the move is clever—the idea is that AOC is unjustly mad at Yoho because she does worse things (calling people sexist and racist) and she is also a hypocrite because she has also used such words. But this rests on an attempt at a false equivalence.

If someone is a racist, sexist or white supremacist, then noting this fact is morally fine. Speaking truth of evil is generally a good action. To use an obvious analogy, testifying that a murderer is a murderer is generally a good action.

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Premise 1: Man M says or does S (that seems sexist).

Premise 2: Man M says that they have a daughter, wife or mother.

Conclusion: S is not sexist, or M should be excused for S, or M is not sexist.

 

It is true that having a daughter can influence a father’s view of gender equality. For example, such fathers can shift towards being more progressive on issues like equal pay and sexual harassment. But referencing a daughter does not prove that a person has such views—that is, it does not follow that what they did or said was not sexist or should be excused.

It is also true that most men would be upset if someone said or did something sexist to a woman or girl they cared about. Yoho, one assumes, would be outraged if some guy called his wife or daughters “fucking bitches.” But their concern about the women and girls they care about does not entail that they care about other women and girls in general. To draw the obvious analogy, it is like the “I have a black friend” defense when someone is accused of being racist. That could be true, but it does not follow that they are not racist. Every sexist has a mother, many are married and have daughters.

There is also the point that has often been made: when people, even from good intentions, invoke the fact that there are women they care about when talking about sexism, seems to imply that a person only cares about sexism because of their personal stake—that if they did not have a daughter, such sexism would not matter. This might be unfair—when people make this point, they are most likely engaged explaining why it really matters to them rather than providing proof they only care because of their own stake in the matter. But this point is worth considering—people should care about sexism not just because they care about specific women, but because it is the right thing to do.

 

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While my criticisms of inheritance might seem silly and, worse, leftist, it is in perfect accord with fundamental American political philosophy and the foundation of capitalism. Our good dead friend Thomas Jefferson said, “A power to dispose of estates forever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural.” The Moses of capitalism, Adam Smith, said that “There is no point more difficult to account for than the right we conceive men to have to dispose of their goods after death.” As such, opposition to inheritance is American, conservative, and capitalistic. But this provides no reason to accept my view. What I will advance in this essay is an argument by intuition against inheritance using a fictional town called “Inheritance.”

Imagine, in a time before COVID-19, that you have been hired as an IT person for Heritage, a company in the town of Inheritance. You pack up your belongings and drive to the town. You spend the first week getting up to speed with the company and are not at all surprised when you find that the top officers of the company are family members—the current owner is the son of the previous owner. This is, after all, not uncommon. You are, however, a bit surprised to find out that almost everyone who works for the company inherited their job. You are one of the few exceptions because the previous IT person quit, and their daughter did not want to inherit the job. This strikes you as rather odd. But a job is a job and you are happy to be employed.

You learn that the town has an upcoming founders’ day and you sign up for the 5K. You find it a bit odd that the race entry form asks you for you best inherited 5K time, but chalk that up to some fun with the town’s name. You are a bit out of training, but run a 18:36 5K, the next closest person crosses the line at 26:22. Since an iPad Pro is the first place prize, you eagerly start towards the race director when she starts announcing the overall winner. You are shocked when the winner is the mayor of the town, Lisa Heritage—you beat her by 10 minutes. Her time is announced as a 17:34, which you know is not true. Thinking this is all a joke, you ask what is going on. Realizing you are the new guy in town, they explain that the place in the race is determined by the faster of the runner’s time or their best inherited time. The mayor’s mother, who was also mayor, was a good runner at her PR in college for the 5K was 17:34. Her daughter inherited the time and can use it for the race. A bit upset by all this, you make a bad joke about her running for office. The locals laugh and say that all political offices are inherited—there is only an election if no one who can inherit the office want it. You hope this is all some sort of elaborate prank.

During the winter you get a sinus infection and go to the town doctor. Looking at the medical degree on the wall, you see it was from Ohio State and the graduation date is 1971. Expecting to see an older doctor, you are surprised to see someone in their early twenties. You ask them about medical school, and they say they inherited the degree and the office. Incredulous, you ask if they have any medical training at all. They indignantly inform you that they have been practicing medicine since they were 17, when they inherited the degree. Looking up your symptoms on Google, they prescribe some antibiotics and send you on your way.

In making this appeal to intuition, I am assuming that while you probably accept the inheritance of wealth and property (including businesses), you probably do not believe that all jobs should be inherited. You also probably reject the idea that political offices, race times, and degrees should be inheritable. But allowing inheritance of property and wealth while rejecting the other sorts of inheritance seems inconsistent. This seems especially clear when it comes to inheriting jobs: while people generally accept it when family members inherit positions in a company, it would be odd for the other jobs to be inherited. The challenge is defending one while rejecting the other; at least if one wants to hold onto inheritance.

While families do pass on political influence (the Clintons and Bushes are good examples of this), Americans generally reject the idea of inheriting political offices—we did, after all, have a revolution to be done with kings and queens. There are clearly reasons for taking this view that are grounded in democratic values; but there is also the idea that inherited offices would lead to numerous harms arising from the concentration of power and lack of accountability. There is also the fact that such positions would be utterly unearned. While democratic values would not apply to inherited wealth and property directly, concerns about concentrated power and unfair advantages would still apply.

In the case of the 5K time, the person did not do the work for the time—they did not earn their victory. But the same also applies to inheriting ownership of the company—they did not earn their position; it was a matter of the chance of birth. The matter of inheriting degrees is also clear—a degree is supposed to reflect that a person has learned things and thus has some knowledge and skills. While this is not always the truth, an inherited degree is utterly unearned and would provide a person with no skills or knowledge. Allowing people to inherit degrees, especially in fields like medicine and engineering, would be disastrous.

One way to reply would be to bite the bullet and accept inheritance broadly. After all, human history has centuries of examples of cultures in which wealth, property, offices, and other things were inherited. This would be a consistent position but seems to lead to absurd results.

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Back in the 1980s I played AD&D, which was the main incarnation of Dungeons & Dragons at the time. Like all versions of the game, when you start out as a new character you roll to see how much starting gold you get. You use that gold to buy your equipment, such as your sword and chainmail or mace and holy symbol. While the starting gold did vary by character class, there were no differences in the economic classes of the characters. For example, all starting fighters rolled 5d4 and multiplied that roll by 10 to determine their gold.  For role-playing purposes, a player could make up their character’s background, including their social and economic class—but it had no impact on their starting gold. D&D has largely stuck with this system and the Player’s Handbook has been devoid of economic classes when it comes to starting the game.

Like many other groups, my AD&D group experimented with adding economic class to the game: a player rolled on a simple chart based roughly on Medieval classes to determine their social and economic class. For example, a player character might be a peasant. The upper classes started with more gold and even some valuable items—some players even proposed rolling for magic items.

As you might suspect, rolling for economic class did not last long: a player who rolled really low on the chart was hard pressed to buy even basic gear; a player who rolled exceptionally well started off with an abundance of gold and gear. We did tinker a bit with the charts, but the ultimate result was a return to the standard rules: players just rolled for their gold using the Player’s Handbook’s chart. People could still roll badly or well, but it lacked the extremes of an economic class chart. The main reason, obviously enough, for abandoning the economic class chart was that it ended up being unfair: while everyone did get to roll, the chart could put people at a disadvantage or grant an advantage at the start of the campaign. And this was with a modest chart in terms of the disparities between the economic classes. Another DM I knew ran a campaign using other charts; one could start out with a keep and retainers in his campaign. One could also start out as a peasant with but a few coppers. As you would guess, the person who started with the keep was quite happy, the peasant far less so. Let us think a bit about using such charts.

Imagine you are playing in a D&D campaign that uses an economic class chart based on the United States, with fantasy names in place of the modern economic class names. The DM is an economic nerd, so they work out the value of a gold piece relative to a dollar, work out the average wealth for each age group in each economic class, work out the percentage of the population in each group and so on.  From all this they create a chart that determines your character’s starting wealth. As in the real world, what economic class you are born into is random. As such, you might roll well and start off with thousands of gold pieces of wealth at the start. Or you might have a bad roll and start with a handful of copper pieces.

Imagine that you are a fighter and roll badly, starting with a few coins. You can buy a dagger, a shield and a sack and that is it. Another player, a magic user, rolls exceptionally well and starts with tens of thousands of gold pieces. She can buy all the gear she needs and, if the DM allows, buy much more. Suppose that the other players roll average—they start off with enough to buy basic gear. If the magic user is good or gets the importance of having a properly equipped party, they will no doubt share their wealth—they might buy you a longsword, plate armor, and other gear so you can keep the monsters from killing them. If you are all working together and share, then this is fine: an advantage for one party member is an advantage for all. But suppose your magic user is selfish and wants to keep all their starting wealth for themselves. While that could be a problem, if your party is still working together, this will not be too bad—if you get your share of the XP and loot, you will soon even things out.

But suppose that the DM is running a campaign in which you are competing with the other PCs—rather than working together as a party, you are competing to kill monsters and loot dungeons. You set out with your dagger and shield and stab a few goblins. The magic user hires several NPCs to assist her and they enable her to slaughter her way through a small dungeon, adding the treasure to her already considerable wealth. She hires more NPCs, gets better gear, and continues to tear her way through dungeon after dungeon. Meanwhile, you are still struggling. You eventually kill and loot enough goblins to buy a long sword and leather armor and move on to ambushing lone orcs. The magic user has moved on to slaughtering giants. Finally, you can take on a bugbear—as the magic user and her hired NPCs take down a blue dragon. The dragon hoard gives her even more wealth and power; she buys more magic items and hires more NPCS. When you are finally ready to face an ogre, she is smashing ancient red dragons and liches. She soon has a kingdom of her own and is about to start a war with another nation to gain even more wealth. The campaign comes to an end; she has won easily. The DM then announces a new campaign will start: your new character will be the child of your previous character, inheriting their wealth and starting the new campaign with that. Just imagine how that will go. The first campaign was extremely unfair, the second takes the unfairness to a new level.

In a purely cooperative game, where everyone is working together and sharing resources for the good of the party, the starting advantage of one is an advantage for all. In a competitive game, a significant disparity in starting wealth provides an unearned and unfair advantage. Players in such a campaign would rightfully complain and insist on having a fair start—otherwise the game is rigged in favor of the player who rolls the best at the start. The same holds true of significant inheritance in the real world which is largely a competitive game. A large inheritance is unearned and confers a considerable advantage.

It could be argued that a skilled player could overcome a bad starting roll and an incompetent player could stupidly throw away their advantage. While this is true, the odds would be heavily against the bad roller and heavily in favor of the good roller. Just because a truly exceptional person with a bad start could beat a truly incompetent person with a vast lead hardly shows that the situation is fair. Now, you might want to play the unfair game and might even get all the players to accept it. But it would be absurd to say it is fair or that it allows for true competition. The same applies to the United States: we can accept an unfair system of inherited wealth, but we cannot claim that the game is fair or allows for true competition. Sure, some do arise from humble origins and achieve fantasy story levels of success—going from peasant to a merchant prince. Some start with all the advantages and waste them, starting with silver spoons and ending up with plastic spoons. But most finish in accord with their start, the game playing out as one would expect.

 

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While Trump has an inconceivable 40.3% approval at the time this is being written, he could still win the 2023 election. His possible victory does not hinge on any pandemic miracle or other such radical change: he can win even if things keep on their current trajectory. So, how can he win?

The first thing to consider is his 2016 victory. While Joe Biden is leading Trump, the same was true of Hilary Clinton. The polls were actually accurate: Clinton beat trump by about 3 million votes in 2016, but still lost to Trump because of the way the electoral college works. Trump could do the same in 2023: get crushed by Biden in the popular vote, yet still win the election. If Trump had to win a majority of the votes, he would almost certainly lose—but he does not need to do that, and this is critical to a Trump 2023 win.

One factor helping Trump is that he has a solid base. Some of his base seem to be analogous to sports fans: they are loyal to him in way people are fans of sports teams. Professional sports teams obviously stand for nothing significant in terms of values, principles, or policies. For example, one is not a Red Sox fan because they stand for constitutional democracy or kindness to animals. You are fan because of things like where you were born, where you went to school, or which team your family rooted for. People often stick to their fandom even when their team is losing, when players are traded and when management changes—after all, they are fans of the team, which is an abstract thing. Naturally, they do want to beat the other teams and often have intense rivalries based on nothing of real significance. Fans even riot and engage in violence because of their fandom. The same seems to hold for Trump supporters—they are fans of Trump, wear his hat, buy his merch, chant his chants, and want him to beat the opposing team. They will stick with Trump like sports fans stick to a losing team—it is their team.

Trump also seems to have a cult following as well—although this analysis is controversial despite the fact that it seems accurate. Trump himself has noted that he could commit murder and not lose voters. While this has not been tested, he does seem to be immune to the consequences of scandals and misdeeds—something that will play a role if he is re-elected in 2023. Trump can thus count on a solid base no matter what he does—which gives him a shot at being re-elected in 2023. However, there is an obvious problem: his dedicated base is a numerical minority and even if he always can count on them, they would not be enough.

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Trump, who is famous for shouting what other Republicans whisper behind closed doors, asserted that,“The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” While Trump is probably wrong about this as a general claim, he is probably right in his own case: if most people vote in 2023, then he would most likely lose. As such, Trump is following a well-established strategic plan—the big difference is that he is announcing his moves publicly.

One factor that predates Trump is the disenfranchisement of Americans who live outside of states. For example, American citizens who are residents of Puerto Rico do not get to vote in the Presidential election as Puerto Rico has no votes in the electoral college. Given Trump’s treatment of Puerto Rico, he would probably not fare well if they were able to vote. While they are citizens, they do not matter when it comes to the presidential election, something that currently seems to favor Trump.

A second factor that predates Trump is the disenfranchising of felons. While people do attempt a modern defense, usually by asking “do you want rapists and murderers to vote?”, this was and is a conscious strategy to disenfranchise black voters. While there is some moral appeal in denying “rapists and murders” their right to vote, it is worth considering that even minor crimes are often classified as felonies. For example, if an 18-year-old shoplifts an Xbox in Florida, then that is a felony (stealing $300+ is a felony). There is also the fact that minorities are policed more aggressively and more likely to be convicted. While it is true that whites are caught up in this, the impact is disproportional on minorities—and Republicans tend to believe that minorities will vote for Democrats. While my adopted state of Florida is now allowing some felons to vote, the Republican controlled legislature is doings its best to sabotage this. While a full analysis of the impact of felony disenfranchisement’s impact on elections is beyond the scope of this work, when you consider that there are about 19 million Americans with felony records and most states restrict their voting rights, this can have a significant impact on elections. The Republicans think that this benefits them; and they are probably right.

A third factor that predates Trump is voter suppression. The Voter Rights Act used to provide some protection for voters, but it was recently gutted, and states leaped to passing voter ID laws and other such things that seem clearly aimed at suppressing voters. The general idea behind these tactics is to make it harder for certain classes of people to vote by requiring IDs, by limiting poling hours, by reducing the number of poling sites and so on. While this does hurt voters of both parties, the belief is that this hurts minorities and hence Democrats more. The usual argument is that these are all aimed at preventing voter fraud: something which happens at miniscule level and hence does not warrant these laws. Ironically, 2021最新快猫破解版ios免费下载_休闲聊天_简易论坛:2021-4-24 · 综合技术交流平台 https://bbs4.cn 回复 支持 反对 使用道具 举报 显身卡 l290733269 0 主题 3 帖子 2 积分 幼儿园 UID ... 简易论坛-综合技术免费交流平台发布的2021最新快猫破解版ios 免费下载帖子由网友提供或转载于网络，若发布的2021最新快猫破解版ios ... The same holds for voter fraud, with Republican Steve Watkins making the news when he was accused of voting illegally. If these efforts at voter suppression and election fraud prove effective, they can help contribute to a Trump victory.

A fourth factor which seems new with Trump is an attack on vote by mail. As with other allegations of fraud, there is no meaningful evidence for this. Ironically, Trump votes by mail. Trump’s real worry about voting by mail is that it will allow a large turnout, which he believes will hurt him. As such, he is pushing (without evidence) a tale of fraud that is infecting the internet. He has also stepped up the Republican war on the United States Post office; he is willing to do significant damage to a service that is actually essential to many members of his base in the hopes of increasing his chances of winning.

Trump has consistently pushed his followers to reject masks and social distancing (though he has started wearing a mask on some occasions)—perhaps this  is tied in to the post office plan: if vote by mail is discredited or reduced and Trump’s followers are more willing than others to vote in person, this would help Trump. That is, he is willing to put millions at risk for the hope of an advantage in the election.

A final factor is that the Republicans control many of the mechanisms of elections and election resolution. Republicans have control of many state legislatures and courts, so contested aspects of the election are likely to end up being resolved by those who favor Trump. For example, if the election ends up in the Supreme Court, it is likely to go 5 to 4 in Trump’s favor. Trump is also refusing to say that he will accept the results of the election if he loses, which is a first for an American president and shows just how much democracy matters to him—that is, not at all.

It might be objected that I am favoring democracy for sinister reasons: I want Trump to lose and know that in a free, fair and democratic election he would get crushed. My response is that I consistently favor democracy, even when my party loses—I have a written record going back that supports this.

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In the United States, we laud the notions of fair competition and equality of opportunity. In fact, these notions are constantly used to justify many things about our political and economic systems. But we also have massive tax protection for inheritance. Roughly put, a person could inherit about $11 million without paying taxes. This presents an obvious tension: how do you have fair competition and equal opportunity with an inheritance system that massively favors the wealthy?

It might be claimed that there is no problem here. To show that there is, I will use the game of Monopoly in my appeal to intuition argument. What I am trying to do is to get you to think about whether you would play Monopoly with inheritance rules and how your thoughts on this matter might apply to the real world.

Almost everyone is familiar with Monopoly. If you are not, the rules can be found km810cm快猫破解 bbs4.cn. The idea is that you win by driving all other players into bankruptcy using the rules of the game. In normal play, the outcome of one game does not affect the next: the game is equal opportunity and fair competition in that everyone starts with the same resources, in the same place and with a chance to win based on ability and luck. My proposed variation adds in inheritance rules to simulate, in a simple way, the impact of inheritance. This variation requires playing multiple games.

 

Monopoly Inheritance (zero-sum game)!

 

km810cm快猫破解 bbs4.cn The first game in the series is played normally using the standard rules.

 

Rule 2: Upon the conclusion of a game in the series, the winning player records what they possess at the end—money, property, houses, and hotels.

 

Rule Three: At the start of the second and later games in the series, one player is randomly selected to receive the game possessions of the winning player from the previous game. The receiving player is the heir and the possessions make up their inheritance. The other players start normally. The game is otherwise played using the normal rules, aside from the exceptions noted in these rules. The series ends when no one wants to play anymore.

 

Inheritance Variations

Players can experiment with these variations to make the game more “realistic” or “fairer.” The rules need to be set prior to play.

 

km810cm快猫破解 bbs4.cn The heir receives a percentage of the possessions of the previous winner (75%, 50% or 25% are suggested). Property is selected by drawing the property cards randomly. Round up.

 

Multiple Heirs: Two players are randomly selected to be heirs, dividing the possessions of the winner of the between them. This can be a 50-50 split or a 75-25 split at the discretion of all the players.

 

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From a philosophical standpoint, the first game could be considered a state-of-nature game (of the sort envisioned by Locke) in which everything is initially available to all and property has yet to be divided up.

The players in the second (and subsequent) game are obviously taking on the role of the next generation. Since birth is random and inheritance is not merited by effort, the heir is selected at random rather than being the previous winner.

I admit that this analogy will break down quickly. To illustrate, the real-world features multiple heirs, there is no equal start for everyone else, there is not just one game with one winner and so on. My point is, of course, not that this game variant is a perfect model of inheritance in the United States. Rather, my goal is to get people who are fine with the inheritance system as it stands to play this variant and see if they still feel that this is a fair ruleset for the game. And then to think about whether it is a fair ruleset for the real economy. The question that I want to pose is this: would you play Monopoly by these rules? Why or why not?

One obvious counter to my analogy is to point out that the real economy is (mostly) not zero-sum. I turn to this matter now.

 

Monopoly Inheritance (non-zero-sum game)!

Monopoly does reflect zero-sum aspects of the real economy because the game is about owning properties and major business (like railroads) and these are zero-sum matters in the actual world. If, for example, I own a vast tract of land, that means less land for other people. While we can make more usable land by draining swamps and building islands, there is finite land on earth. The same generally holds for businesses—there is a finite limit and the success of my business in an area limits the success of others.  So, for the zero-sum parts of the economy, Monopoly is not a bad model. But about the non-zero-sum aspects of the economy. what if Monopoly could be made into a non-zero-sum game?

In the real economy, the idea is that the sum grows over time. The same can be applied to the game. A crude way to simulate this is to add in the Board Expansion rule variant to the inheritance rules (unlimited money, houses, and hotels can also be added by creating them as needed). To play this variant, you will need several Monopoly boards.

 

Rule 1: Prior to the start of the next game, place another Monopoly board with its Go square adjacent to the Just Visiting square of the prior board. Repeat until the players decide to stop playing. Play begins in the Go square on the board from the first game.

 

Rule 2: Once a player’s piece has completed moving completely around a board (from Go to back to Go), they must exit the board and move to the next board. A board is exited via the Just Visiting square and entered via the Go square. Once a piece has completely moved around the final board, the piece must be moved back to the prior board and so on until the original board is reached. The process then begins anew and continues until the game ends. The board a piece is on is treated as the game board for that piece.

 

Alternative Rule: Instead of being forced to leave a board after moving completely around it (from Go to go), a player can elect to stay on a board if they wish. This rule allows players a chance to escape the original game’s board.

 

This variant allows for a non-zero-sum game, limited only by the number of Monopoly boards on hand. While I do agree this allows the players who do not have the luck of inheritance a better chance, the player who gets the inheritance still has a significant advantage. While there will be a new board with property available to all players each game, the player who has inherited from the previous game will be in a far better position than the other players to acquire the new property. The main effect of the expanding game would seem to be that the heir player will have ever more property at the end of each game and thus the next heir will have an even greater advantage over the non-heirs. While the game is not zero-sum, those that lack the inheritance will probably still lose and those who inherit will generally do better.

So, I would close again with the question: would you play non-zero-sum Monopoly? Why or why not? I suspect most people would not, seeing it is an unfair game. The same, I would contend, also applies to real life.