How many property tycoons were first set on their merry way by playing Monopoly when they were children? The thought is prompted by a letter to the Evening Standard a few weeks ago, reproduced in the July 2nd issue of this magazine (which was how I came to read it), which told of the origins of Monopoly. A lady called Lizzie Magie invented Monopoly in order to expose the evils of property speculation. You can read more of the story here, and here.

Like a lot of people at the beginning of the last century, Lizzie Magie was a follower of Henry George. But the Monopoly story reminds me of another tale about another piece of anti-property-speculation propaganda, of the Communist variety, that also went wrong. As I heard it, a revered Communist used once upon a time to give fiercely well informed and minutely detailed lectures about the evils of the Californian property market, in pre World War II Los Angeles I think this was. By the end of the story, all the most successful property developers in post World War II Los Angeles were former Communists, and graduates of this one man's lectures. They were so impressed by what they had heard that they decided to do it for themselves. (Their mentor died poor.)

Have I got that right? Can anyone supply any links to internet material that will confirm or deny any of it? Or is it one of those urban myths?

Whether my Communist teacher of property tycoons is truth or legend, I have long suspected that Communist propaganda in general will be looked back on by historians as having had very different results to those intended.

I recently encountered, in a remainder shop, a big book containing hundreds of Chinese Communist propaganda posters, much like these ones. They depict a vivid and colourful fantasy world of industrial excellence and economic triumph, of collective progress and personal fulfilment, of joy. The people who now preside over China's current economic miracle were teenagers when posters like these were at the height of their influence, and I think this is no coincidence. It makes perfect sense to me that the more imaginative and impressionable people brought up on imagery like this would turn away in disgust from the lumbering state centralism that these posters were intended to sell, once they realized that state centralism could never deliver such wonders, and instead switch to being enthusiastic pro-capitalists and even capitalist entrepreneurs. After all, only if China switched to capitalism could a real future like this be even hoped for, let alone rationally anticipated.