This weekend I got to remembering the marble games we used to have during recess when I was in grade school. Spring was the “marble season” – perhaps that is what brought it back to my memory. As I think about it the feeling is kind of “Leave it to Beaver” moment in the ’50’s before the world became paranoid during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

We played three different, but similar games. One was playing in a circle scratched in the dirt, another was in the shape of a fish, and the third as a game of “catch me if you can’ chasing game. I much preferred the one played in the circle. The game went something like this: (1) players dropped a number of their marbles into the ring, (2) someone started shooting from outside the ring, trying to knock a marble out, (3) if you knocked a marble out but stayed in the ring, you could shoot again, (4) if your “shooter” went out of the ring, or if you didn’t eject another marble, it was the end of your turn. Then it went to the next person. I don’t recall how the order of shooters was selected. My recollection says that if you missed and ended up in the ring, then your “shooter” was fair game for the next people. This was a serious situation because prized “shooters” were almost magic, losing one was not a good thing so you had to try to avoid being stranded at the end of your term.

I wasn’t a very good player, but consistent. I often won a couple of extra marbles, but wasn’t good enough to run the ring and knock all of them out. That was an advantage to me because people would play with me, usually someone else would pick up a few extra marbles too. The “good” players had a harder time getting a game – who wants to play someone that takes ALL of the marbles every time.

As the weeks from spring to summer progressed each year my marble bag would get full, to the point that I made a much larger bag than normal to hold my small but consistent winnings. As summer approached, things began to get more difficult because I often had most of the marbles, other players didn’t have enough to join a game. That is when we would switch to “chase” because that only took one marble to join a game.

When we were finally in the last week before summer, I did something that seems odd in retrospect. I would go to the middle of the paved part of the playground and dump all of the marbles out of my bad onto the pavement. They scattered in all directions, being chased down by whoever happened to be there – restoring almost everyone’s stash of marbles. I ended up with none (except for my magic shooters and enough to start playing during the following spring. Next year it would happen all over again. The thing about marbles is that they were expensive (for us kids) and relatively difficult to come by – being mostly passed down from kid to kid, or maybe parents buying a little bag if needed. My guess is that there was pretty much a constant number of marbles in play, we didn’t just “print” more when we ran out.

This reminded me a little of some of the stories about the Native American potlatch idea. Potlatches were “give away” ceremonies held for many reasons such as celebrating a birth, a victory, or some other good event. However, it is my understanding that they were also used as a means for “redistributing” wealth when as a course of events one person would accumulate too much while others didn’t have enough (kind of like my marble conundrum). There seems to be a natural tendency in trading situations for some people to acquire more while other get less. This tendency accelerates over time because the “rich” people have more, and better, resources and therefore have an edge in the game. The rules of the game of trade where that everyone had to try their best, but just naturally there were differences and the wealth would become too unbalanced. Periodically this would become unbalanced enough that it was time for a give-away (potlatch) to even out the wealth within the tribe. If this wasn’t done, then the game broke and could no longer be played (just like with my marble game). Resetting the wealth allowed a game that was obviously flawed because of the tendency of wealth to accumulate wealth to continue functioning thousands of years (or in my case, until the next spring).

At one point in the United States we attempted something similar through a steeply escalating tax structure. In the 50’s the top tax rate was as high as 90%, effectively limiting the accumulation of resources (wealth) by a few – thus fueling a very vigorous and thriving economy. Roads were built, public schools worked, colleges were almost free, the health care system was rapidly growing and finding amazing cures. We were attempting to follow Henry Ford’s business model that he had to pay his workers enough so that they could buy his cars because he needed to sell cars. He was wise enough to understand that he had to create a market for his products if he was going to succeed.

It seems to me that we have somehow lost track of the idea that taxes build things that industry requires in order to be healthy, and that industry requires a consumer base that can afford their products. They need a healthy and educated workforce. An easy way to accomplish that is to pay for the education, pay for a health care system and pay for many other services that are vital to the efficient and competitive functioning of the economy – including their businesses. All of those kinds of “socialist” things aren’t the wealthy paying for other people, it is the wealthy paying for the services that they require in order to do business. It is using the economic benefits of taxes to pay for things that are required by industry but which industry has no means of providing on their own.