#i also wish there were some more intra-family support chains :') but this also means i can do whatever i want so hehehe

[honeydots]

Any headcanons for Forrest relationship with Uncle Xander and Laslow? I like to think Xander is quietly supportive of Forrest, but it is such a shame Forrest doesn’t get to support with his Uncle.

hehe i think they'd love him! i mean of course, they're his uncles, but still. xander'd come across (as he does, as he is) as a pretty stern uncle--but forrest is good at not defining people based on their appearance, so i can imagine him being the type to be like "my uncle is actually VERY kind and thoughtful and sweet and--" *proceeds to stretch the truth* gusjfjsfb but i think part of this comes from that xander really does dote on forrest, similarly to how he treats elise.

laslow i think, at first, would be just really excited there's another baby around hahaha i think he'd love to visit tiny forrest! but as he gets older, well--forrest looks a lot like maribelle! i don't think this would go unnoticed by laslow, though i think he'd find that really charming, too. laslow knows a lot of precious and darling little tea shops around that i think he'd have fun visiting with forrest ("how do you know all these places?" "ah, well--"), and tbh. i think they'd lightly tease leo together LOL not to his face, just kind of gossiping quietly about him (with love ofc)

[berniesrevolution]

The game of Monopoly was originally quite different when it was first patented in 1904 by a progressive woman named Lizzie Magie. Magie’s game, called “The Landlord’s Game,” was like the version you grew up playing, in that it could be won by accruing as many land lots, properties, and cash as possible. But her version came with a twist. At any time, the players could choose a more egalitarian future by voting in the Single Tax rules.

Once activated, the Single Tax required players to redirect all fines and rents on empty lots into the Public Treasury’s coffers. For any player to erect properties or collect a fine on an existing property, the Treasury first had to receive rent on the land. These public funds paid for public utilities, transportation, and college, which then became available to everyone for free. Residual funds were redistributed as higher wages for everyone. No individual could really win the Single Tax game, other than by collaborating to break up all monopolies.

Magie admired the radical philosopher Henry George, and hoped the Single Tax rules would educate players of all ages about his proposal for common land ownership. These calls for bold reforms emerged from anxieties of the first Gilded Age. Magie and George had lived through an era marked by rapid economic growth, deep inequality, political corruption, and sprawling industry trusts controlled by a few men. The status quo seemed unsustainable. If this sounds familiar, it’s because our own Gilded Age has all the symptoms of the first.

In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the economist Thomas Piketty attributes the spike in American inequality to an imbalanced distribution of the national income. By national income, Piketty means the sum of labor income (the wages earned by workers) and capital income (the earnings from physical assets like houses and factories, and financial assets like investment accounts and corporate profits). Much like the first Gilded Age, advances in technology have magnified American productivity. We become better at creating and selling more stuff and in turn, our pie of national income grows larger. The problem is that since the 1970s, the slice of income going to workers has not kept up with their share of contribution.

The statistics are depressingly familiar. Today, the richest one percent controls 40 percent of the country’s wealth and about 90 percent of all income gains. Inheritances and other intra-familial transfers of assets explain some of this phenomenon. That so few families have so much to pass on certainly contributes to inequality. But patrimony alone cannot account for how aggressively the owners of capital have been able to commandeer more than their fair share. To understand this rapid concentration of wealth and income, we must also consider the metastasis of corporations into colossal trusts, happening at the same time as the government shirks its duty to protect consumers and workers.

The year 2015 alone saw a reported 4.7 trillion dollars’ worth of merger and acquisition deals. Chemical companies Dow Chemical merged with DuPont and on the food side, Kraft and Heinz became one. Two years later, Amazon purchased the Whole Foods chain, while the CVS pharmacy brand acquired the insurer Aetna. In 2018, the pharmaceutical firm Bayer is taking over the agricultural giant Monsanto in a 62 billion dollar deal. Year after year, thousands of firms across the economy swallow their competitors or other businesses in the supply chain to control more of their market.

But should we actually care about the unions of these corporate leviathans any more than we do about royal weddings? With our economy controlled by tangles of subsidiaries and shell companies anchored in exotic locales, keeping score of who owns whom seems like a futile effort. Corporate names and logos blur together in a sea of deals reported only in the most boring articles for only the most boring lawyers. For at least a while, our food tastes the same; our prescriptions cost the same; our quality of service seems the same. So we sit like frogs in a pot of simmering water, undisturbed by the aggressive consolidations of corporate power around us. By the time we notice the changes, it’s often too late.

The common wisdom is that, in a fair economy, market competition fosters innovation as firms attempt to build on each other’s advances. It also leads to higher quality, lower prices, and better deals for consumers, workers, and other producers in the supply chain. Firms that wish to thrive and grow are supposed to cultivate their relations with all these stakeholders, or risk losing them to competitors. An economy where firms possess too much market power breeds opposite conditions.

In a series of papers on this subject, the economist Marshall Steinbaum describes market power as a “concentration and substantial power” that allows firms to “skew market outcomes in [their] interest, without creating value or serving the public good.” In other words: The more powerful a firm becomes, the more it can crush stakeholders and competitors without consequences. This is true of monopolies—when a producer has exclusive control over the supply of a product or service—but it really extends to any firm with concentrated market power.

The menu of “crushing” options at their disposal is quite diverse. Generally though, they fall in the categories of consolidation, barriers to entry, and a broader set of anticompetitive behavior. The larger that firms become, the easier they can increase their control of the market. The recent deals illustrate just how frequently corporations with a lot of market power consolidate with their competitors. After the purchase is complete, firms can integrate the new acquisition into their brand. Sometimes, they simply maintain the purchase as a separate subsidiary though the consolidation gives them much less reason to vigorously compete with each other. In other cases yet, the firm might shut down the new purchase forever.

Consolidation can double as a barrier to entry when the absorbed company is a startup that could have or supported or even become another competitor. But there are other types of barriers. Patents give the holder an exclusive and enforceable right to supply a product for many years, even if this monopoly of use could hurt society at large. Then there are refusals-to-deal agreements—where firms conspire to do business with an exclusive list of companies—which more subtly cripple young businesses trying to enter a market.

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