If you’ve ever played Monopoly, chances are you know how frustrating it could be. One smug winner, through pure luck, gloats over his unearned victory, and five other losers quietly or not-so-quietly seethe or flip the board angrily. It’s so unfair! A few pats on the back and admonitions... after all, it’s only a game. Right?

Well, it turns out that our societies are slightly more complicated games of Monopoly. And while we can all set the game aside and return to the “normality” of our lives, we cannot really ignore the way our societies are currently structured. It affects everything in our lives, from what we think about in the morning, to what we end up doing in the evenings, to how we perceive reality itself.

You are a piece on the Monopoly board and you don’t have a choice but to keep playing the game, even when you’ve landed on one too many hotels, even when you’ve started playing the game when all the properties have already been bought.

There’s no resetting the conditions in your life, unlike the game which restarts whenever there is one winner and five losers.

Monopoly was actually designed to teach people about the unfairness of unchecked capitalist dynamics and how this inevitably leads to the unequal and unmeritocratic outcomes we see in the world today.

Originally called ‘The Landlord’s Game’, Monopoly was designed by Lizzie Magie, an activist known for her unconventional methods of conveying the logic of injustice, and was meant to introduce people to the ideas of the political economist Henry George, who wanted to create a more efficient form of capitalism by taxing landowners.

The idea is quite simple.

The air we breathe is naturally occurring, necessary for life, and available to everyone, regardless of race, gender, social class, politics, or country of origin. Nobody should have to pay to breathe air, because nobody invented air. Sounds reasonable, right?

So why cannot the same be said for land?

Land, like air, is natural, necessary for life, available to everyone, and invented by nobody. So why do you pay to live on it? Why should people be allowed to wall some of it off and charge you to live on it? It’d be like owning a patch of air.

George saw that many were getting very rich off extracting value from the land, whether because they were landlords or from mining, without doing anything at all to improve the land. Surely, he thought, since nobody invented land, it should equally belong to all members of society, like the air we breathe.

Others now do not have access to the land and should be compensated for it- Ivan Bartolo

If you want to live on the land, wall it off, and call it your home, you would expect the rest of society to respect that. Therefore, you should pay a tax on the value of the land you are trying to claim to pay for that protection from society. Because others now do not have access to the land and should be compensated for it. Land is therefore taxed on its value, excluding what is built and developed on it.

This means that three adjacent plots, one with a house built on it, another with a block of flats, and another undeveloped, will have the same tax obligation. This incentivises development, improvement and reallocation of land for its most productive use. It also disincentivises holding on to undeveloped land for speculation.

This solves four problems George believed were hindering progress and keeping people in poverty:

1. Income taxes. People would no longer need to give away money they have worked hard for to pay for the work of the government. Only the rich landowners would pay for services.

2. Landlords. As the land value tax is based on what tenants are willing to pay and not raised or lowered at the landlord’s will, the position of “landlord” will eventually cease to exist. People will be allowed to move freely from one place to another without the possibility of rising rents affecting someone’s decision to move. Georgists also support the socialisation of public transport, allowing free movement of people.

3. Debt. Whatever is left of the revenue from the land value tax after the government is fully funded should be split up and given back to the people equally. This means that those with the lowest income would benefit most from this citizen’s dividend.

4. Inefficiency. Owners of land who do not use it will have to pay the land value tax, and since they are not earning anything from this land, they will have an incentive to sell it to whoever is willing to make better use of it.

Once we see the problems this form of taxation solves, there’s “only” the thorny problem of getting the super-rich to stop hoarding their wealth.

And if you know how smug the winner is in a game of Monopoly, imagine how smug these same players would be if Monopoly were their life…

Nationalist MP Ivan Bartolo is a member of Parliament’s Social Affairs Committee and Opposition Spokesman on Social and Affordable Accommodation, Pensions and the Fight against Poverty.