Is there any other "sport" so perfectly encapsulating everything shitty about capitalism? It's got everything:
- Extremely large amounts of nature converted to courses made out of non-indigenous plants that waste water and labor keeping the grass at a constant height
- Course are owned by tax-dodging private social clubs with hefty membership costs
- New members have to be approved by the existing membership, so undesirable (read: non-WASP) members of the community can be rejected even if they can meet the economic costs
- Special discount rates offered for family of current members, ensuring generational wealth and privilege is maintained
- Most of the workforce is made up of undocumented laborers from Central America who do manual labor in exchange for shitty wages
- Middle school-age children are employed as off-the-books pack animals so the players don't accidentally do any amount of manual labor
- Players also have the option of driving little cars (with no safety mechanisms at all) so they don't accidentally get exercise
- A whole match takes four fucking hours to complete, requiring substantial free time on top of the sunk costs in fees and equipment
Climate destruction, resource waste, tax-dodges, racism, nepotism, illegal and child labor, and extremely high artificial costs for a leisure activity: I can't think of a single more appropriate avatar for capitalism. Well, maybe if there were slaves.
golf is everything wrong with landlording distilled into a sauce. In fact, I'm just gonna say that they're in the real estate business, not in some separate category. Their business is holding property, and boosting the value of property. That's. It.
Any sufficiently bougie neighborhood just comes with a golf course? Puh-lease, that has nothing to do with fun
Golf can still exist in our socialist utopia like theme parks can still exist. There don't need to be several per county because hoarding land will also be gone.