Introduction
"If you’re just joining us, this is the third entry in the series “How Much Could a Banana Republic Cost,” where we use the titular question to help pinpoint who and what the ruling class is made of. > The first post set up our candidates: Big Guns (armies, militias, and mafias), Big Graphs (technocrats and knowledge companies), and Big Green (investors, corporations, or individual plutocrats). > The second gave us a first-pass answer to the series’ guiding question, based on the actual history of the concept: A banana republic would cost a sizable $202,014,343.21 in 2021 dollars.
"...Today, we’re trying out a version of the Big Green theory that we can call the “Monopoly” model: think Elizabeth Magie’s famous board game, not Microsoft. At the beginning of the game, the game board is wildly open. As players play, they buy and develop specific squares on the board that represent parcels of land or property, and compete over who can own more than the others. Maybe the world today is something like the middle of a Monopoly game: A few people own and manage different bits of our society, a few bits are up for grabs, but nobody owns the whole board—yet. This Monopoly version of the Big Green theory describes the world as a patchwork of connected fiefdoms rather than a total system with a shadowy central ruling cabal. In principle, each social “square” can be—and often is—bought, sold, developed, and traded by those with enough money.
There’s a lot to be said for this view—after all, much of what is now the United States was acquired in exactly this way. The success of the Haitian Revolution
forced French Emperor Napoleon to sell much of the French empire’s territory in the Western Hemisphere. The famous Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the country by transferring to the United States the imperial right to
displace Native Americans. But that kind of brazen buying and selling of whole groups of people and their territory is supposed to belong to a bygone era, like the empires of old dynastic families: houses such as
Windsor,
Osman,
Solomon, and
Aisin-Gioro.
But modern problems have a way of finding modern solutions. Allow me to introduce a more recent dynasty: the house of Friedman . .
[...]
In
an influential 2009 Ted Talk, another Chicago-trained economist suggested a marriage between capitalism and freedom worthy of Friedman’s legacy. Nobel Prize winner Paul Romer called for literal private government in the form of “charter cities”—essentially, allowing the rich to buy a square on the global Monopoly board. Part of why poor countries are trapped in poverty are their bad rules and bad government, Romer reasoned. So why not let rich countries buy parts of poor countries? Then you would have rules and rulers decided by proven historical winners. . .
[...]
These squares on the social game board have been put up for sale by governments or run through public-private partnerships, which economists Ndongo Samba Sylla and Daniela Gabor describe as “budgetary time bombs.”
By the way: Both the political situation in which governments feel the need to turn to the private sector and the ideological situation in which the private sector seems to have the answers are both deliberately engineered, as Naomi Klein famously investigated in The Shock Doctrine. According to her research, crises in Russia, New Orleans, and Afghanistan gave economists the opportunity to implement long-standing plans to auction off government services and public property to the higher transnational bidders.
Though few of us live in private cities, maybe the line between our government and Próspera’s is thinner than we might hope. Maybe we all live on one of the world’s Monopoly squares or other. . ."
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