> Yep, that. Free Parking is meant to be just that, free parking, not a reward for constantly going to jail just to roll double fives. It prolongs the game and moves money around unnecessarily.

I'll be honest, it wasn't until 2006 or so as we were in the midst of the real estate led bubble era that was about to burst and take the whole World economy down it it that I realized how critical the 'jail' part to act as a deterrent to cronyism was to a game like Monopoly, but was entirely absent in real life.

As a biology student I saw Big Pharma play by different rules with no repercussions: Bayer admitted it was selling contaminated medication with HIV to poor countries in Asian and S. America with no repercussions in the 80s and settled out of court, then I saw how Eli Lilly removed panelist off the FDA board (who were Chiefs of Medicine with many accolades) because it wouldn't blindly approve its drug, Gilead Sciences (with Donald Rumsfeld) and Roche were massive benefactors of the H1N1 Tamaflu vaccine that was stock piled by Governments but affected very few people in the US, all while we saw the rampant corruption in the Finance and Banking sectors go wild wit reckless abandoned only to get bailed out and get drunk on golden parachutes and bonuses.

The fact that we see that now in Tech is not even surprising to me, just infuriating that we never seem to learn our lesson, and seems consistent with everything else we've seen; the only exception being that now the Market Cap of many of these tech corps are on par, and often exceed, that of entire Nation States.

The fact that they haven't been broken up goes to show how fundamentally wrong the Nation-State model is at doing anything but enabling it as they directly benefit from the fraud, corruption, and largess and making even less scrupulous people wanting to line up for a seat at the trough. AIG tried to buy off my University's department staff after taking massive amount in bailouts in 2008 in order to get something--why they wanted Health Scientists still baffles me to this day, but it happened and I went to war over it. We already had a large corporate bio-pharma presence on campus prior to that.

That's when I realized that while Capitalism may be the best system we have to create prosperity thus far, we have to create a replacement for it too, because it has a very fundamental flaw and a pernicious habit to revert to corporatism cronyism (fascism) very quickly that concentrates wealth and thus power to a certain series of entities (monopolies) who as a common practice will pay or hire politicians to bend to their will.

And nothing can be really done about it as they legalize these conflicts of interests, so just like when we played Monopoly and one player gets so much of the money/real estate to the determent of all who are still playing they will use every advantage at their disposal to keep the very one-sided advantage going for as long as possible. And the parallels here, especially with COVID shutdowns of certain Industries and enabling of others to record profits (FAANG in particular) and massive unemployment in others shows it most poignantly.

What we really should be calling it is Fascism as paraphrased by Mussolini (the merger of Corporate and State Power):

The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others; it makes its action felt throughout the length and breadth of the country by means of its corporate, social, and educational institutions, and all the political, economic, and spiritual forces of the nation, organised in their respective associations, circulate within the State.

0: https://www.politicalresearch.org/2005/01/12/mussolini-corpo...