Monopoly’s precursor “The Landlord’s Game” was invented by Lizzie Magie in the early 1900s to demonstrate why Capitalism needs Georgism to actually have any semblance of fairness, competition, and longevity.

Georgism is roughly the idea that ALL tax should come from land ownership, and that taxes on labour/wages should be abolished.

The game was created to be a “practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences”. She based the game on the economic principles of Georgism, a system proposed by Henry George, with the object of demonstrating how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. She knew that some people could find it hard to understand why this happened and what might be done about it, and she thought that if Georgist ideas were put into the concrete form of a game, they might be easier to demonstrate.