She believes they are an imperfect way of understanding a person’s expression.
A. The speaker is saying that she and her peers should be allowed to handle the punishments for people like Hester Prynne. She thinks this because they would band together as a group and be all on the same page in their punishment, rather than leaving it up to the magistrate--whose punishment she does not think adequately fit the crime Hester committed.
The metaphor for life in this poem is a game of Monopoly with no winner. The poem describes a situation in which, through the process of trying to beat out the other competitors in the game, no player ultimately wins (see the "Crabs in a Bucket" metaphor for a similar idea).
