In the year 1215, King John of England was ambushed by a group of Nobles in a meadow called Runnymede and was made to sign the Magna Carta.

The Lords and Barons who wrote the Magna Carta wanted to establish limits to the previously absolute power of the King and to return England to the state of law that existed prior to the Norman invasion of 1066.

None of those present were alive in 1066 and none of them really knew exactly what the rule of law was in pre-Norman times - they mostly just made it up to suit themselves.

The Magna Carta has since had a profound influence on constitutional law and part of the document was later re-written into the US Constitution - "No person shall be ...deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process..."

The right to own property thus was deemed to be inalienable by invasive aliens in a land whose original human inhabitants had no concept of private ownership.

Private property rights form the basis of Capitalism and along with banking and credit facilities were crucial to the development of large-scale privately owned industry as the Industrial Revolution gathered momentum in the 1800's.  Many goods had previously been produced under the domestic or cottage system.  Under this system, raw materials would be delivered by a merchant to a craftsperson's home where people working on their own time would produce clothing, lace, baskets, shoes or what-have-you to be later collected by the merchant for resale. The Industrial Revolution spawned a new idea - the factory system.  Large buildings were put up, industrial machinery installed, and workers were recruited to drive the machines. 

Workers lost autonomy over their time and the tasks they performed moment by moment and gave up the right to self-determination for the duration of their work hours.  The system was evolving and the rules along with it.

In Britain, the enclosure movement was forcing the poor off the land; most faced the choice of working in the factories, emigrating or starving.  In the Northwestern United States, after Colonel Edwin Drake had successfully drilled for rock oil in Pennsylvania and established that kerosene refined from it could be used as a subsitute for whale oil, corporations were established and rapidly grew in size, monopolising supply of fuel and distribution of freight by railroad, making massive profits.

Corporations were originally set up for the service and benefit of the wider community but Government turned a blind eye to the sheer scale of the profits made and some of the anti-competitive practices that were going on because in the infancy of corporate capitalism everyone was benefiting.  Grain farmers in the MidWest were now able to efficiently ship vast quantities of wheat into bagel shops in New York and bakeries in Boston for example - once hapless innocents engaged in subsistence on the Mid-Western plains began evolving into major primary food producers and wheat became a commodity product traded mostly on the basis of price.

As the Industrial Age began to kick into high gear, industrialists began to worry about the capability of industry to turn out more product than could be sold to a public that stubbornly retained many pre-industrial values and remained essentially frugal.  In 1929 an article written by one Charles Kettering appeared entitled "Keeping the Customer Dissatisfied".  Kettering was director of research at General Motors.  He advocated a change in approach - from need satisfaction to need creation.  From pull to push. 

Advertising was nothing new but had been limited to basic newspaper ads and rough posters until Thomas Barratt of the Pears Soap Company revolutionised the industry with the use of expensive reproductions of artworks printed along with glowing recommendations from doctors and chemists which appeared in newspapers and magazines.  An 1883 advertisement covering the whole front page of the New York Herald quoted religious leader Henry Ward Beecher as saying "Cleanliness is next to Godliness" - associating Godliness and virtue with the use of Pears soap.

The advertising industry grew through the 1920's developing further on propagandist techniques refined during the First World War.  Following the setbacks of a major economic depression and another World War, the wide uptake of televison and a condition of growing affluence during the 1950's enabled spectacular advancement in advertising's reach and influence.  Initially a whole televison show would have a single sponsor but soon the idea of an ad-break was developed so that multiple commercial messages from a variety of advertisers could be inserted into a single program.  Since the 1980's there have even been shows about ads featuring nothing but commercials introduced by a witty host - and with ad breaks.

Henry Ford, who was largely ignorant of history, had long before declared it was 'more or less bunk'.  A future-obsessed populace, eagerly anticipating commuting to work in the morning by jet-pack, went along with the idea.  In Western society, and particularly in North America, a new generation was rocking around the clock, hanging out at the Mall, and looking towards a future so bright everyone wore shades.  Everyday life was beginning more and more to resemble a Disneyland fantasy and popular thought, such as it was, was informed by Flash Gordon and Star Trek, Barbie and Ken, open blue sky and romantic sunsets set to orchestration by John Williams. Above all the theme of the age was Progress.  Economic expansion without limits.  Systematized manufacturing techniques, not invented by Ford but forever associated with his name, had revolutionized the booming production of cars which were coming off the line in massive numbers and so cheaply that in an economy awash with easily extracted oil, even the burger flippers could afford them.  Workers were able to shut out the horrors of busy, polluted, noisy cities by commuting to and from manicured suburbs in the comfortable leatherette interiors of their vehicles.  Waste was flushed or trucked away, dumped somewhere out of sight.  Life was as bright and shiny as Doris Day and becoming increasingly fake - from the plastic trees lining the roads of many American freeways to the smiles on the faces of the customer service staff to pre-packaged food manufactured using production line methods and so processed that consumers didn't even have to digest it on their own.  Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was materialising right in front of people's eyes but no one noticed because they were too distracted by the sideshows of that very same Brave New World - cinematic spectacles ever larger than anything before and a growing smorgasboard of consumer goods, toys, motor vehicles, modern home comforts and gadgetry continually updated to next year's model - usually introduced half way through the year prior.

Instead of adding to one's happiness, the reality is that an oversupply of consumer goods subtracts from personal satisfaction, adding to one's misery (while multiplying rapidly and dividing one's attention).  Chocolate-coated sugary candies leave a taste in the mouth that can only be assuaged by the consumption of more chocolate candy, gaudy entertainments dull the senses to anything but even more gaudy entertainments.  It never occurred to a Roman that there could be a number zero, it never occurred to most Americans that less might be more. 

Any society that fails to control its appetites in the short run surely will go hungry in the long - you can quote me on that one dear readers - and the surest way to ruin is printing paper money and spending it.

President Nixon removed any connection of the dollar to a value standard such as gold in the early 1970's.  This was necessary if the consumer mardi-gras was to continue as the United States was passing its peak of domestic oil production and energy is money. The rules governing credit expansion were now free to be made up as they went along and a system of global finance, now largely experimental, waited like a dormant influenza virus ready to evolve into a pandemic explosion of debt once computers and telecommunication networks enabled risk modelling and creative packaging of loans into parcels for resale.

Archimedes said, "Give me where to stand, and I will move the earth."  He was talking about the power of levers - to him it was not a question of whether someone had the strength to move the Earth but simply a matter of where you had to stand to gain sufficient effect from leverage.  Fossil energy is a form of leverage in that it can be used to power tools that augment human muscular energy.  Borrowed money, effectively a debt against future energy reserves, can be used as leverage to increase the effect of monetary gains.  Now, like a teenage boy behind the wheel of a muscle car, whole Nations of doe-eyed, dairy-fed, daydream believers imagined it was they, their power, their cleverness, that wrought these wonders and not a one-off endowment of fossil resource.

The public couldn't make the connection between energy and debt-based money and no one wanted to think about resource limitations.  They only knew that nothing could stand in the way of Progress. 

The main driver of Western economies for the last decade or so has been consumer spending.  To begin with this had a positive effect - stimulating retail activity and service sector employment.  But each time there was threat of a recession - in a capitalist economy necessary for manufacturers to re-align their products, work out excess inventory, improve processes - central bankers dropped interest rates making credit easier to come by and re-stimulating spending.  Savings rates dropped to nothing and then went negative.

Once the initial huge advantages of industrialised production had been realised and markets had been saturated, the law of diminishing returns began to take hold and tweaks to time and efficiency gave only minor benefits.  The focus turned to cost-cutting.  Manufacturing was exported to cheap labour economies.  But this changed nothing about the old problem that industrialised production is capable of turning out far more product than consumers actually need.  What do you do when everyone already has a car, two cars, a boat, a fridge, a beer fridge, the latest vacuum, a washing machine, clothes drier, food processor, lawn mower, electric iron, a TV in every room, electric shavers, multiple stereos, dvd players?  You turn to your pals in the advertising industry, to create a perceived need for bread makers, juicers, cappucino machines, rice cookers, yoghurt makers, Mr. Soda, ipods, robotic vacuums, electric air fresheners, ever more obscure manufactured appliances to fill ever more trivial manufactured desires and then you make an offer too good to refuse by making these products available on credit and then easier credit and easier credit again.

Consumers began spending more than they earned, debt became normalised.  Interest rates in the US have now effectively hit zero, with no more room to cut rates, the Federal Reserve is directly purchasing bad debt - just another way of printing money.  Even as your author struggles at his keyboard, the US Government is buying up General Motors, former employer of Charles Kettering, a company that could be turning out thousands of new cars a day, if only someone actually needed another car or had the money to buy one.  Leverage, as we are currently finding out, increases profits in the good times and increases the pain in the bad.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, so said Isaac Newton, and every debt has to be paid back and accounted for sooner or later.

Socially, too, there were problems boiling away under the surface - although it's hard to quantify the equal and opposite part.  Millions of people who were unable or unwilling to take part in the market frenzy found themselves on the streets, in prison,  or dependent on substances that provided an alternative to perceived reality.  Numerous counter-cultures developed, some of which came bundled with wacky conspiracy theories about how the Illuminati, the Rothschild dynasty, the Jews, are controlling our minds and our destinies because they are the evil Masters of the World, in possession of the secret of the Grail discovered by the Knights Templar while crusading in the Holy Land... or some such.

But these were just distractions, really it was our own thoughtlessness, our casual and disaffected attitudes.  We've been complicit in our own undoing, equating self-determination with having the choice of six different brands of canned beans while the consumer society we've all been a part of regressed backwards into infantile, childish behaviours, focussed only on immediate gratification.

If you buy something with money and it doesn't work, then you have a right to get your money back or be compensated in some tangible way.  When so much of life is commercialised, the idea becomes endemic that everything that goes wrong is someone's fault, someone else must be to blame, someone else must be responsible.  Dickheads spill hot coffee on themselves in the drive-thru and then go and sue McDonalds for a million bucks.  Not that I'm sticking up for McDonalds, but really.

When everything is corporatised and enclosed, citizens become disgruntled, disaffected, alienated and have no sense of community and no sense of ownership over their shared public spaces.  It's every man for himself.

Alienated, disgruntled consumers make alienated, disgruntled workers.

In the cold, bloodless spirit of the production line, more and more administrative work became call-centerised.  Workers were becoming so disaffected and demotivated that in order to get done efficiently, work needed to be externally driven by incoming calls.  Increasingly, data entry was actioned by the customer through automatic teller machines, the internet, or while on the phone to customer service.  Work output could now be precisely measured against a set of call standards, pitting each customer service operator against the other.  Managers started referring to a worker as a resource.  Processing and decison making was as much as possible accomplished automatically by computer software.  Your author spoke to a bank recently about his account and was told by the operator "Computer say No!".  Anything that doesn't fit into the systems and processes probably isn't profit-making activity for the organisation and therefore just isn't done.

Computer models became a substitute for thought.  Finance companies keyed parameters into the model and out came a risk assessment.  Rare or hard to predict events that fell outside the scope of the software - Black Swans as author Nicholas Taleb named them - weren't accounted for.

'Hey, I'm just paying the mortgage!' became a familiar catch-cry, both as an ethic for those engaged in obviously dubious employment such as debt-collection or cigarette and alcohol promotion and a lame excuse for those who sensed they could be doing something more relevant or meaningful.  King John of England, brother of Richard the Lionheart, typecast as the villian in the Robin Hood Legend, who may have died from eating peaches, signed the Magna Carta or Great Charter in a picturesque but disgustingly named English meadow called Runnymede. The mortgage (from the French mort = death and gage = engagement, an engagement until death) was enabled  by property rights written into law as a result. In the modern push-driven marketplace, one that is desperately creating perceived needs and supplying instant gratification for those manufactured needs in compensation for the de-humanised, shallow experience of modern life, what evil is perpetrated for the sake of paying the mortgage?

Your author has a distant relative who is a classical pianist of some minor renown.  Recently Adrian and his partner Ken returned from Australia and they held a small function in their central Wellington flat in celebration of his return to a civilised nation.  I hadn't seen him for some time prior to this reunion and noted that he was looking a little pale and unwell having spent the past two years in Queensland, but nonetheless, he enthusiastically took up the call to play a little for those gathered.  A Chopin etude was suggested.

"Oh, Chopin," gushed one of the ladies, "Gorgeous - I love the romantic period. And Chopin is so personal and expressive!"

Someone else I heard whispering in the background: "Good grief - They're not still listening to fucking Chopin - Jesus!"

But the flamboyant Adrian, who always enjoyed showing off, was happy to oblige.

After shifting in their seats for some extended time the assembled audience clapped quietly and this was more than enough to encourage Adrian to play some more.  We were later to regret not shutting him down earlier for it turned out he been working on his life's splendid acheivement - Augustin Guane's classical masterpiece the 'Black Fugue'.

Pianist and composer Augustin Guane was born in 1783, the son of a Parisian prostitute and an unknown father, and studied music under strict Jesuit priests in a French orphanage as a boy.

Guane never got over the brutal demise of his Mother, beaten to death in front of him by an enraged client in 1789, and he threw himself into study of the piano at which he demonstrated considerable instinctive talent.  This had the benefit of allowing him to largely withdraw from the world around him while providing exposure to rich ladies on the Paris social scene - exactly the kind of women his mother had imitated in manner and dreamed of becoming.

In 1803, Guane, who had grown to be a large and profoundly ugly man, was committed to the Bicentre asylum following an unfortunate incident at a soiree in the parlour of Madame Bodday where he became confused and confessed his love for her in front of a number of guests after repeatedly addressing her as 'Mama'.

At Bicentre he met the Marquis de Sade and along with de Sade was later sent to Charenton asylum where they collaborated on two small volumes of debauched erotic poetry.  Guane often referred to de Sade as 'Father' and took part in many of the plays written by de Sade and acted out by inmates as a type of therapy.  It was during this period that he attempted to read, although he mostly misunderstood, Dante's Divina Commedia and developed a life philosophy based on part of the work - the journey through hell, purgatory and paradise.  Guane saw this as circular and ongoing - that we all pass through these stages in an ongoing circular journey.

He became obsessed with the concept of Hell and Paradise as polar opposites with purgatory as a transitional stage between the two.  He saw a darker, more intense Hell as a means of making paradise brighter and more holy, that great pain intensifies the experience of pleasure, that great wealth cannot be created without also creating great poverty, that night will appear darker if the day is brighter and so on.  During life on Earth, Guane thought, a person goes through 'hell' phases and 'paradise' phases.  Therefore, intensifying the 'hell' phase is a means by which to ensure greater virtue during the following 'paradise' phase.

With this in mind, he set out to capture and distill the essence of Man's greatest discomfiture, malevolence and evil into a piece of music. For him the means by which to achieve the highest divinity was by confronting and accentuating his most intense, debased wickedness.

The 'Black Fugue' occupied him for the rest of his life, is a depiction of Dante's nine circles of hell, and is a piece so diabolical in its heinous harmonic dissonance that few have ever attempted it - French authorities having been trying to suppress the piece for almost two centuries.  Guane died before completing the work - he was found dead by a priest at Charenton, fallen over his keyboard, the blood-stained manuscript between his left cheek and the piano keys.  When attendants came to remove the body, the manuscript stuck to Guane's face as if by magnetism and could only be removed with great care and effort.  It is said that the mental state of many of the other occupants of the Charenton Asylum improved markedly in the weeks immediately following Guane's death.  I learned later that Adrian had been working on this gruesome masterpiece for some decades and that this explained the long string of boyfriends/partners several of whom had committed suicide and/or sought counselling.

Adrian began the piece.  A shiver could be visibly seen to pass through the ladies present.  Facial expressions quickly changed from curious surprise, to alarm, disgust, and abject horror.  A fat gentleman fell off his chair.  The crash was not noticed over the din of the dischordant piano being violently hammered in wild sprays of arrhythmic dischord.  Everyone began simultaneously to break out in a sweat and to feel cold chills.  Someone had a bloody nose and had to leave the room.  One by one everyone else made for the door, some of them wobbling on their feet,  until Adrian had, as they say in the business, "cleared the stage".

Finally, Adrian, trembling, finished the piece, sat motionless except for a nervous shivering for about twenty minutes, and then got up and walked out, locking himself in his room for several days, leaving boyfriend Ken to wipe up the blood and snot from the piano.  Fortunately most of the guests had already left anyway.

That, dear readers, is why you should never give anyone with artistic pretensions any excuse whatsoever to control proceedings.  Shut them down.  Say politely but firmly "No!"

Your author hopes very much that his MySpace friends had a fantastic Christmas and New Year.

Christmas for your author usually includes a holiday trip to Blenheim, New Zealand, where his family stays with his in-laws.  This year’s was an extended break lasting 11 days.  Father-in-law is a highly successful public administrator with PhD qualifications and former director of a significant international commission, mother-in-law a lawyer, brother-in-law a geo-mapping specialist, brother-in-law's partner manages a team of database administrators and here is your author - call-centre worker.  He sometimes feels himself pedestrian and undistinguished amongst this company.  The setting for holiday festivities being an orchard in a region of New Zealand that produces some of the world's finest sauvignon blanc.

Your author received a tour of the property and inspected a number of fruiting trees. A discussion was had about pruning, during the course of which your author commented that a tree at home was growing in an unkempt and rambling fashion but that he didn't really know anything about how to prune a tree.  "You take a look at the tree as it is now, decide what shape you want it to be, and cut it so", said father-in-law.  Your author had nothing further to add to this illuminating example of practical common sense and a brief and slightly uncomfortable period of silent contemplation followed.

In the face of financial crisis, trend-watchers say that frugality is becoming the new cool.  People are learning to be thrifty again.  Around the world, in an echo of the 30's Great Depression years, people are looking for entertainment without having to spend money.  In this spirit, somewhat ironically, those gathered played Monopoly.

As there were a large number of players and all were couples, the idea was mooted briefly of playing in teams of two but after discussion this idea was dismissed - Capitalism is a game best played individually.  Economic theory's central premise is that any society is simply a collection of individuals who will behave in ways consistent with their own self-interest.

According to the instructions page that comes with the set, the game of Monopoly was invented in the early 1930's by Charles Darrow.  Darrow was an unemployed heating engineer who retired a millionaire at age 46 becoming a gentleman farmer who travelled the world collecting species of exotic orchids. 
 
Darrow's history prior to selling the game of Monopoly to Parker Brothers seems a little uncertain.  In addition to an "unemployed heating engineer", your author's Google search finds him variously described as "a lecturer for a coal company", "a plumber", "a heating equipment salesman", a "laborer", and "an unemployed ne'er-do-well living off the earnings of his wife".

It turns out that in 1974, an economics professor by the name of Dr Ralph Anspach released a new board game called "Anti-Monopoly".  Anspach had played Monopoly with his children and became frustrated with trying to explain to them that contrary to the philosophy of the game, monopolies are actually a bad thing.  When he couldn't find another game available to demonstrate this point, he created his own.  Parker Bros sued Anspach for infringement of its trademark of the word Monopoly.  Anspach lost and by court order 40,000 copies of Anti-Monopoly were buried in a Minnesota landfill. But Anspach was a determined individual and after a court battle lasting over 10 years finally won an appeal in the Supreme Court.   During the course of his court ordeal, Dr Anspach uncovered a very different story about the creation of Parker Bros' Monopoly, the most successful board game ever.

In 1903, a Quaker resident of Virginia called Lizzie J. Magie, applied for a patent for a board game she invented called "The Landlords Game".  Magie was a supporter of the single-tax movement which proposed abolishing all taxation except for that upon land values.  Her interest was in creating a board game that educated lay folk about rent and taxation issues especially from the perspective of single-taxers (also known as Georgists after Henry George a leader of this movement).  Georgists believed that Capitalism could only work if no one was able to realise profits from ownership of land.  The ideas of Henry George have attracted a resurgence of interest in recent times amongst environmentalists as under Georgism, individuals own the results of their work but everything found in Nature belongs equally to everyone.  Taxing the land and only the land (or the fishery, forest, airwaves etc) therefore builds a cost of use of the natural resource into the pricing of commercial activity derived from the common resource without imposing a taxation burden on other economic activity.  The properties on Magie's board game are for rent only not purchase or trading but otherwise her game is remarkably similar to the Monopoly we know today.  She was granted a patent in 1904.

Through Quaker networks and single-tax enthusiasts, the game began to spread in popularity around the Eastern United States.  Players usually made their own playing boards by drawing them on cloth.  An early player called Priscilla Robertson wrote about her experiences playing The Landlords Game which was increasingly becoming known as "Auction Monopoly" and then simply "Monopoly":

"In those days those who wanted copies of the board for Monopoly took a piece of linen cloth and copied it in crayon. It was considered a point of honor not to sell it to a commercial manufacturer, since it had been worked out by a group of single taxers who were anxious to defeat the capitalist system."

The introduction to the instructions for Lizzie Magie's game state: "The object of this game is not only to afford amusement to players, but to illustrate to them how, under the present or prevailing system of land tenure, the landlord has an advantage over other enterprisers, and also how the single tax would discourage speculation."

Parker Brothers have a different outlook: "The idea of the game is to buy and rent or sell property so profitably that one becomes the wealthiest player and eventually monopolist...The game is one of shrewd and amusing trading and excitement."

Parker Brothers' views about how the game should be played seem consistent with the way they conducted business in the real marketplace.  Parker Bros had initially declined to purchase the Monopoly game after being approached by Charles Darrow - saying at the time that the game had "fifty-two fundamental errors".  Darrow, however, was having some limited success selling copies of the game on his own through department stores.  Robert M. Barton, who by his own admission during the Anspach Anti-Monopoly trials became president of Parker Bros by marrying the founder's daughter Sally, heard about the game after Sally took a phone call from a friend who raved to her about the copy she had bought at F.A.O Schwarz.  Barton went out to F.A.O Schwarz, bought a set and was up that night till 1 PM playing it.  He wrote to Darrow and they met three days later.  Parker Bros bought Monopoly outright and paid Darrow a royalty on every game sold.

Darrow had claimed that Monopoly was his "brain child" and that he had mapped it out on a piece of oilcloth having been inspired by a story about a commercial school he had heard about that was teaching students about scrip markets using play money.  In fact he had been introduced to it as a complete game in a hotel in Germantown, Pennsylvania.  Parker Bros, who had sustained considerable losses in the first years of the Depression, were having instant and considerable success with Monopoly.  In the first year they sold over a million sets.  Although in the meantime Darrow's fraud had become known to Robert Barton, Parker Bros were reluctant to give up copyright on a major success so Barton began a campaign of buying up previous incarnations of the Monopoly game.

Barton located Lizzie Magie and bought the Landlords Game from her for $500.  She was happy for the game to be marketed by a major distributor as she wanted to educate folks and demonstrate how property owners became rich at the expense of impoverished tenants.  She received no royalties.  Parker Bros marketed the landlords game for a brief period and then shelved it.

In the 1920's, a character called Dan Layman had released a version of the game called "Finance".  Layman testified during the course of the legal proceedings against Dr Anspach's Anti-Monopoly in the Seventies:

"I understood from various attorney friends of mine that because Monopoly had been used as the name of this exact game, both in Indianapolis and in Reading and in Williamstown, Massachusetts, that it was, therefore, in public domain and that I couldn't protect it in any way. So, I changed the name in order to have some protection."

A friend who had played Monopoly with Dan Layman during their college years heard about the court proceedings and wrote Layman a letter in which he commented sarcastically, "They forgot to mention that when Darrow died, he was working on the  invention of the wheel."

Layman had been a victim of the Depression and in desperation sold the rights to Finance to small games manufacturer David Knapp for just $200.  Robert Barton from Parker Bros paid Knapp $10,000 to hand over rights to the game and keep his mouth shut about its history.

A Texan named Rudy Copeland had been producing a game called "Inflation".  Parker Bros sued him for copyright infringement.  Copeland counter-sued saying that copyright on Charles Darrow's game was invalid.  Fearful of the consequences of the true story of Monopoly becoming public knowledge, Parker Bros immediately settled with another $10,000 in return for Copeland surrendering his rights and keeping quiet.

Prep school friends of Dan Layman had been fanatical players who had worked on a set of rules and had some game boards.  These were in the possession of two brothers Fred and Louis Thun.  The Thun brothers had also considered patenting the game but became aware of Lizzie Magie's patent and rightly knew they couldn't patent something they didn't invent themselves.  They instead copyrighted their own version of the rules which they tried unsuccessfully to sell to Macy's and Saks Fifth Avenue before giving it up.  Robert Barton from Parker Bros called on Louis Thun in 1935 and paid him $50 each for the remaining game boards.

In this way, Parker Bros secured the monopoly on Monopoly.

Thun, who spent his working life running his family's textile machine business, testified during the Anspach Anti-Monopoly trial about Barton's visit:

"I told him it wasn't at all clear to me how Mr. Darrow could be the inventor of a game... we'd played since 1925. I said I was in the machine business and he was in the game business, and I was going to leave it at that."

Cute rags to riches stories like that of Charles Darrow are easy to perpetuate and enhance the appeal of a product like Monopoly because they sit so nicely with the central myth of Western Capitalism - that anyone with enough wit or anyone prepared to work hard enough can get rich and prosper.  This is the central tenet that we all buy into that has kept Western Democracies functioning under something like orderly control so far but just like the folky little story that Charles Darrow invented Monopoly by himself on a piece of cloth on his kitchen table it is total bullcrap.

As a representation of free markets the game not surprisingly falls well short.  Remember it is almost identical to Lizzie Magie's Landlords Game which was intended to demonstrate what Magie perceived to be an unfair compulsion that landlords are able to impose on tenants to pay rent.  In Monopoly imposing that compulsion on a player who happens to land on your property by chance is the stated goal.  Free marketeers and economists see markets as a system by which willing players come together to trade.  Monopoly disregards the choice of market players to participate in a particular trade or not.  Consumer choice is absent and instead players participate by roll of the dice and are compelled to move accordingly.

The one monopolistic constant regardless of how any particular game may play out is the bank's monopoly on issuing money.   The game realistically has a central bank with the ability to inflate the currency.  The rules state that the bank 'never goes bankrupt'.  In the event that the bank runs out of money, players are to use slips of paper.

On one occasion when the bank ran out of money during a 161-hour game held at the University of Pittsburgh in 1961, players wired Parker Bros who "bailed out" the bank by air-freighting extra money to Pittsburgh, delivering it to the campus from the airport by armoured car.

The problem with bailouts is they prolong the game but can't keep it going forever.  Sooner or later players drop out as they can no longer afford to participate until the money has concentrated into the hands of the winner at which point the money becomes just useless slips of paper again as no new players are coming in to replace those who have gone bust. Winning a game of Monopoly is a uniquely lonely and empty experience.

Empty and lonely like a home after a housing bubble that ran out of a supply of new chumps to sign up a mortgage at a higher price than the guy before them.

That's your author's opinion.

And he won the Monopoly.

On Friday night, your author had the privilege of attending his daughter's final school disco for the year - the theme being 'Christmas Celebrations' (some outside the box thinking going on there).

He was a little horrified by the number of parents who 'dump and run' i.e. drop off their kids and make a hasty exit.  Your author, who is as stiff as a board and not used to school dances, momentarily entertained thoughts of doing the same.  However, surrounded by young innocence and enthusiasm, he was soon taken in by the infectious atmosphere and even got up for the 'chicken dance'.
 
The DJ worked the crowd with liberal distribution of chocolatey treats for best and most original dancing and much fun was had by all even if the choice of songs seemed somewhat dubious for 5 and 6 year old ears, to quote: 'Go heavy go with it,  Get ya sexy up' and 'It's Britney, Bitch, I'm Missis extra-sextra-licious baby!'

Following these heady numbers, there was a short break to allow the parents in attendance a chance to catch their breath and for distribution of snacks to the little ones - a bag of chippies, a chocolate bar and a fizzy drink each - so both major food groups (sugar and salt) plus hydration all checked off.

The community spirit exhibited by a group of children - at least these small children anyway - was wonderful and enlightening to behold.  They were all equal in each other's eyes, all of them naive and non-judgemental.

What do we do to protect these beautiful little monkeys from the disappointment many will face when the community they grow up in turns its back on them and expects them to take individual responsibility for both the good fortune they may happen across and the mistakes they make in life?

Goethe said, 'If everyone swept his own doorsteps, what a clean world it would be' but here in the real world your author notes citizens who have no doorstep while others pay teams of workers to clean their many doorsteps on their behalf.  A fair and equitable society has never yet existed ever.  There has never been a society able to enjoy the comforts and benefits of its technology in a sustainable way, and like perpetual motion, an investment that provides a return without risk is an appealing idea but one that has yet to be realised.

What we have today in the western world is as close as we have got so far; though we largely rely on fossil energy to support our current arrangements and minus the distracting seductions of TV and the Nintendo Wii the young and the disaffected may likely take to the streets in unrestrainable numbers for bouts of fresh air and destructive exercise.  Like Goethe's Faust we have sold our souls but remain unsatisfied.

Those of us who grew up in more positive times of hope and economic growth may misguidedly see only a temporary downturn ahead of us but increasingly the young are growing up to find the McStanky old malls barren and sterile, alienating and not worth preserving.  Not worth going to war for, not worth buying into the culture that built them, the future only hopelessness and decay.  They find no sense of belonging and nothing more stimulating to occupy their evenings than to gather in the alleyways with their butts hanging out of their pants, crotch flapping about their knees as they inhale the contents of spray cans out of plastic bags and offend the passing old people with their attitudes and appearance.

Your author used to piss his parents off by growing his hair long - how times have changed!