IT'S TIME TO STOP PLAYING MONOPOLY.

AuthorHightower, Jim

In the board game Monopoly, the goal is straightforward: Accumulate property, control the board, and financially ruin all of the other players. It was created in 1903 as The Landlord's Game by ardent anti-monopolist Lizzie Magie to educate people about the economic and social destructiveness of concentrating land ownership in private cartels. (It's not for nothing that each Monopoly game box is adorned with a caricature of a top-hatted, robber-baron tycoon, dubbed "Rich Uncle Pennybags.")

More than a century later, real-world monopolists retain the game's original objective: Accumulate market power, crush competitors, and run the board.

But rather than a game of chance dependent on a roll of the dice, today's corporate monopolies are products of carefully plotted and executed power plays. Theirs is a game for the biggest, richest, most avaricious plunderers. Just to be a player now requires investing millions of dollars in campaign contributions, lobbying firms, lawyers' fees, and so on.

Why? Because Americans HATE monopolies.

From 1773's Boston Tea Party--an audacious direct assault on the British East India Company's attempt to monopolize colonial America's tea market--we have vehemently rebelled, again and again, against corporate control. We deem it to be inherently anti-democratic, abusive, un-American... and morally unacceptable. But, as Thomas Jefferson warned at the start of our republic, "monied corporations" know that they don't need the public's acceptance if they can buy backdoor acceptance from a few public officials.

Still, people's disdain for monopoly power is so ingrained that lawmakers and their corporate purchasers can't just pass a law declaring "Monopoly is hereby authorized." Instead, they do it bit by bit through a process of obscure statutory deceits, pipelines of legalized bribery, vats of public relations perfumes, and other devilish schemes to rig the rules of competition against actual competition. Major brand-name corporations use workarounds to create and extend monopolies without ever having to say the word, leaving their tactics with obfuscating names ranging from the arcane to the quasi-comical, such as "category captain system," "slotting," and "no-poaching agreements."

Over the last forty years, the most common way to establish a monopoly has been to think, What the hell, let's just go buy one. With antitrust enforcement hogtied by lawmakers in harness to corporate backers, it's now considered a...

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