I plan to post some old columns on my new blog site because it is a very effective way of making words appear here without me doing any work. I have about four years of columns to chose from but I stumbled across this one. I think it is significant because it was written in early 2008 and it shows that I came up with the idea of the government giving money away almost a full year before Congress did.

If I ever regain my sense of humor, I'll start posting some brand new stuff here. Right now I'm just focused on raising $25.

If we played the game my way, we’d all win at Monopoly

STEVE EATON

Published: January 27th, 2008 01:00 AM

I think the problem I am having with life is that there is no Free Parking. I used to rule the world in Monopoly. We didn’t play by the actual rules. Our rules were better. At least everyone felt that way until my smarty-pants son, Jackson, went out into the world and came back with a whole new fun-sapping view of the game.

He said that when other people play Monopoly, they don’t put any money in Free Parking. Nothing. We used to put everything we paid into the middle of the board and that pile-o’-cash would go to whoever landed on Free Parking.

This, of course, could change the direction of a game just like a fire hose could change the direction of a paper airplane in flight. It allowed me to play recklessly. I would invest everything I owned in houses and hotels, and we had no limits as to the numbers of them you could build. We used Legos for hotels and built skyscrapers.

It was a joyous lifestyle and I nearly always won because other family members would approach the game in a grown-up, responsible way and try to save their money. I would come barreling through like Godzilla in New York and get my way with everything.

Jackson came back from the outside world and insisted we play by the real rules. Suddenly the game I used to play to escape from my life, was a lot like real life. I realized I’d have to save my money or I’d be rudely ejected from the game. It was like discussing the need for dental work while on vacation. It sucked the joy right out of the game. With my son’s new rules, I had no hope.

That’s when I realized that that’s what I’ve been missing in my life – Free Parking. In Monopoly there are usually some players who get lucky and land on lots of stuff. They get Monopolies and season tickets to the Seahawks. There’s always one player, however, who gets Water Works and Baltic Avenue and that’s it. The rest of his life is spent traveling about the board hoping that he’ll will soon be thrown in jail or win second prize in a beauty contest.

That’s pretty much what’s happened to me, except that I have no hope of winning second prize in a beauty contest. Sure, I’ve got Baltic Avenue and Water Works, but in this game I’m just doomed to wander through life as an old metal shoe unloved by anyone except the presidential candidates who can feel my pain. No one ever knocks on my door and says, “Hey buddy, I just landed on your property and you’ve got a house, so here’s 200 bucks.”

I think we need a national Free Parking. There should be some hard cash method of collecting money and throwing it in a silo somewhere. This is not the kind of thing that could be done electronically. It would have to be a system built around piles and piles of real cash. So much cash that if you hit Free Parking you’d have to get a wheelbarrow to haul it away.

Everyone would have a crack at it and when they hit it, well, they’d end up putting the money right back into Free Parking because they’d be the ones buying the season tickets and pizza for everyone. There’d be no need to worry about running out of money. There’d always be the hope that you could hit Free Parking again.

Just think about it. If you woke up tomorrow and had the hope that maybe, just maybe, you’d roll a 10 and hit Free Parking, wouldn’t that give you a tiny bit of incentive to get out of bed?
Now I know some of you are saying this is nothing more than a lottery. No, it’s not. No one ever really hits the lottery. Who do you know personally who has won the lottery? No one. With a Free Parking system lots of people would be striking it rich.

“Honey, I’m home,” I’d say. “I hit Free Parking again today and quit my job.”

“That’s nice,” my wife would say. “Leave the wheelbarrow outside this time, please.”

The real problem here, of course, is that this game is already under way and the players with all the property are not going to like changing the rules. They’d be happy paying someone to go down to Free Parking to haul back the cash for them, but they’d get quite cranky if they saw one of us poor shoe people walking away with cash falling from our pockets.

Still, we should make the move now because we have the presidential candidates on our side. They know what real Americans want. Think about it: If just one candidate came up with a Free Parking proposal, the news people would make fun of him or her on the news that night and then, suddenly, the next day … oh, we’d have a real front-runner.

The people with the Monopolies will laugh but they forget how many poor shoe people are out there. They forget who is paying the rent. The first thing they’ll notice is all the cheerful people walking about. Next, they’ll notice a giganto hotel on Baltic Avenue. By then it will be too late. You and I will have bought all the wheelbarrows. It will be a whole new game.