Yesterday I watched my daughter and her friend play the Byron/Ballina version of Monopoly. It was mildly ironic and a little sad. A game of property where kids like these, without intergenerational wealth, won’t own property. Monopoly is a horrible game. Mainly because it never feels like a game. It feels like a reenactment of everything that’s wrong with our relationship with property. According to a google, Monopoly started with the name, The Landlord’s Game and was invented by a woman who only got $500 for the patent. Classic patriarchal capitalism in action! And nice work grooming kids into sociopaths so they can be ruthless property developers of the future. Yuck.

Byron Bay High School’s achievement in winning every cash prize in the recent national ASX Schools Sharemarket Game was unprecedented in the competition's history.

66 millionaires earning almost a billion dollars put together paid no tax last year ... We celebrate people like this. But their profits come at a cost. It’s called poverty.

Mandy Nolan’s recent Soapbox article on the mental health crisis was a ripper. Spot on. She’s right about one of the principal causes: capitalism.

I was shocked to see the cost of local bread I buy in Mullumbimby had risen 40 per cent. That particular loaf is becoming a luxury item.

For decades, we have been engaged in the old cold war battle between capitalism and communism.

Since the federal government has no nominal limitations on spending, it means that it can always afford to buy anything for sale in its own currency, including labour. As such, unemployment is a political choice, not an economic imperative.

This Earth crisis, you could say, is capitalism’s final product. Built on a promise, that wealth would trickle down. At the geographical north pole, the sun rises and sets once a year. A timelessness exists and in this ineffable quiet you can hear a quickening trickle of a glacier melting pass by your feet.