A Series of Unfortunate Events- The Playboy Mansion

Step 1: In the event that you have not read “The Lady’s not for Burning”, go back, read it, and then proceed to read this post.

When I had journeyed half our life’s way, I found myself within a shadowed forest, for I had lost the path that does not stray.

I invite you to chat with Alexander Tyler- Democracy is not an American invention. Its course can be easily charted. Religious and political bondage provoke courage and audacity, compelling men to assert their liberty. Liberty gives birth to affluence, and affluence invites complacency. If unchecked, complacency leads to dependency, and listless reliance will deliver the same men back into bondage. A generation of Americans has awakened to find that they are no longer sprinting toward freedom or autonomy, but groping about blindly, having lost the true path.

In reclaiming the right path, the steps of American democracy must be retraced, so as to illuminate the decisions that brought it to this present quandary. America is a nation of aggregate interests- but by and large, all want freedom, and all want security. The founders did not put in place several individual mechanisms to protect the many ends of liberty- economic freedom, secure investments, privacy, and personal and religious freedoms. Primarily, they expected that property rights would secure freedom, and they trusted the constitutional structure and the common law to protect property rights.

Property rights allow Americans to live without government interference: to take ownership of land, businesses, and ideas, to raise a family behind closed doors and watch their own television channels. It means that when Americans own something, it is truly theirs and not Uncle Sam’s.

The connection between property rights and liberty is not obscure. We have all witnessed it.

Case in point: American Boy has his own room. The boy reaches puberty and tapes pictures of busty naked women on his door. Subsequently, the boy’s father tears down the pornographic pictures, hits the boy with a belt, and delivers a stern lecture about lust and sexual depravity. (The father promptly confiscates the pictures and relocates them to his own nightstand, stowing them under a pile of taxes for a night when his wife is gone). But the point is clear- the father controls the décor in the boy’s room because, while the boy resides in the room, it does not truly belong to him.

This is America’s true treasure. Thanks to property rights, the boy grows to adulthood and purchases his own home, where he is free to wallpaper every room with luscious breasts. Finding a shortage of perfect breasts in the world, the boy re-decorates with more supple silicone breasts. In fact, by the impotent age of 80, the American boy owns a mansion bursting with licentious, surgically altered females that were previously available only in smut magazines and viewable only in the pseudo-seclusion of a public restroom stall. Furthermore, he broadcasts a television show documenting his salacious escapades with the playmates, so that all sexually frustrated men can share in the glorious ecstasy of his sex life.

And as is he who unwills what he willed, and because of new thoughts changes his design, so that he quite withdraws from beginning, such I became on that dark hillside: wherefore in my thought I abandoned the enterprise which had been so hasty in the beginning

Subsequently, American men, apparently lost in this languorous bliss, forgot that it was the responsibility of ownership- of paying for and managing their own property, that afforded them such pleasures to begin with.

Early American contract law was eviscerated. The state governments, who protected the property rights of their citizens, were castrated by the 17th amendment- and thus the National Government usurped much of their power. The 14th amendment gave the Congress room to preempt the states at virtually any time- for the good of state citizens. Oliver Wendell Holmes flipped the common law on its head, removing its roots in natural law and ensuring that it no longer served to protect life, liberty, and property. Americans decided that it would be convenient to let the National Government carry private burdens and manage private investments. Why not let the government ensure that our economy stays afloat? Why not let the Government ensure that we have money to retire on?

Is there a shortage of real men in America?

Imagine for a moment that after reaching the age of thirty, the American boy returned to his father and said, “Dad, it appears that I am a sexual savant, but a poor economist. Suppose I give all my money to you, and you give me an allowance. That way I’ll save enough money for the important things in life- you know: higher education, healthcare, prescription medication, retirement…”

The boy is pleased at first, but his vision begins to fade. Upon asking his father for money for see the optometrist, he finds that his father withheld only enough funds for the podiatrist. The boy complains that he has never had a foot problem and asks why the father invested his money there instead of buying a policy that covered optometry. He goes blind, but prances about gleefully on his Dr. Scholl’s inserts, discovering that deep down, he had always fostered a burning desire to be gellin’ like a felon. When the boy wishes to retire, he returns to his father but collects only a meager portion. He asks where the rest of his money went and the father replies that he did not have time to manage the boy’s money on his own. Instead, he hired a financial advisor to manage it. He explains that the bulk of the boy’s money was spent paying the salary of this financial advisor. The financial advisor places the boy in a retirement home, but to the boy's dismay, he finds that the home has put a ban on sexually explicit materials. The administrators declared that "states of intense sexual arousal could be detrimental to the cardiac health of elderly men." The boy asks to be transferred. Three months later, he recieves an email from his father's financial advisor's secretary's office assisant- promising to look into it.

In a final act, the government siezed the Mansion, offered minimal compensation to the father, and replaced it with government-subsidized housing. Finding that they had no other marketable skills, the displaced Playmates moved into the housing development. From then on, their rent payments and expenses were afforded by the other taxpayers of the state, in the form of welfare payments.

Fear not, for no one can take from us our onward way, by Such an one it is given to us.

This is not the American way. Americans take pride in responsibility because responsibility is power. There is no other interpretation. So in the words of Dante,

Consider well the seed that gave you birth: you were not made to live your lives as brutes, but to be followers of worth and knowledge...