Tag: hit&run

Heather Mac Donald writes about this at the City Journal. The most striking data is on the average grade breakdown of incoming associates by race (which stems from what appear to be quite aggressive racial preferences in hiring), which comes from my colleague Rick Sander’s The Racial Paradox of the Corporate Law Firm (2006); note that it is from the “After the JD” study of lawyers who joined the bar in 2000, though my sense is that not much has changed (at least as to blacks and whites) in law schools and law firms since then:

To the extent that grades measure legal ability—and I think they do to a considerable extent, though of course the two aren’t perfectly correlated—it’s not surprising that the disparity coming in would yield disparity in attrition and in partnership rates, though of course this doesn’t preclude other possible causes for the latter disparity. For a response to Sander’s article, see this piece by James E. Coleman, Jr. & Mitu Gulati.

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Maybe journalists are just confused. Maybe some are partisan hacks trying to rehabilitate Kamala Harris’ image for her. Either way, there’s been a rash of recent pieces suggesting that the Democratic senator from California and 2020 presidential candidate has revised her tough-on-crime tactics and stances. And almost every time they talk specifics, it turns out to be wrong.

First, the headlines told us that Harris wants to decriminalize prostitution. Pressed on CNN in April, Harris made clear that this wasn’t so.

We were also told last month that Harris “regrets” the truancy laws she helped pass—first in San Francisco and then statewide in California—to criminalize parents if their kids miss school. Headline after headline made it sound like she’d had a genuine change of heart. But all Harris actually said was that she stands by her efforts but regrets that some parents were arrested under the law, saying this “was not the intention.”

But prosecution of parents was the express purpose of these laws. These arrests were no more an unintended consequence than arrests for breaking the laws against burglary or sexual assault. Sure, it would be nice if no one committed these crimes and no arrests had to be made under the laws prohibiting them. But arrests are by no stretch of linguistics an unintended consequence in any case.

In any event, Harris explicitly defended her truancy crime laws—and lied about them—in an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN that aired Sunday. Harris told Tapper, falsely, that “not one parent was sent to jail” because of her initiative:

TAPPER: Well, you pushed for a statewide law, right, a statewide truancy law.

HARRIS: And the state…

TAPPER: And people were thrown into jail under that law.

HARRIS: Not by me.

TAPPER: Not by you, but you supported the law.

Of course they weren’t literally put in jail by Harris, who was attorney general of California when the truancy law was enacted and not an arresting officer. Yet no common understanding of “no one was sent to jail” means People were sent to jail, but they weren’t personally put there by the attorney general. Again, we see Harris trying to rewrite her record and history.

Regardless, avoiding actual jail time doesn’t make prosecution painless. Parents charged under the truancy law were still arrested and put through long and embarrassing ordeals, even when students had very legitimate reasons for missing school. You can read about one of these parents in this HuffPost piece, “The Human Costs of Kamala Harris’ War on Truancy.”

Harris admits in the CNN interview that she had a homeless mother of three who was working two jobs arrested when her kids missed school—but she insisted that this was for the woman’s own good. (The idea that having to take time off work to meet with prosecutors and judges, pay court fees, and take mandatory parenting classes actually helped this overworked and indigent mother and her family is the kind of logic that only a cop or politician can love.) Arrest allowed them to get the homeless woman the services “that she needed and didn’t know was available,” argued Harris.

That’s a refrain we often hear for why it’s important to arrest homeless people, drug users, minors in the sex trade, adult sex workers, and members of many other groups whose “crimes” are not against others but against themselves or “society.” And it’s always bullshit. Incarceration, a criminal record, fines and fees, etc. don’t help anyone, and they’re regressive in that they hurt the hardest the poorer and more marginalized someone is.

There are always better ways to get people services they need. And when caging someone or threatening to is the only way to get them to accept your “help,” it’s probably a good time to rethink how helpful you’re actually being.

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FREE MINDS

San Francisco reporter Bryan Carmody woke up to police officers bashing in his door on Friday morning. A few weeks prior, Carmody had refused to give police the name of his source for a story on the death of San Francisco public defender Jeff Adachi. Now police were back with a warrant to search his home.

Carmody “wasn’t about to give up his source on Friday either, despite the escalation—not to the police or two FBI agents in suits who questioned him about the case,” The Washington Post reports:

“I’m smart enough not to talk to federal agents, ever,” Carmody said. “I just kept saying ‘lawyer, lawyer, lawyer.'”

So he stayed handcuffed for the next six hours, he says—a certificate of release from the police department that he distributed says he was in custody from 8:22 a.m. until 1:55 p.m.—as investigators searched his home, then his office, where they found the report in a safe. A search warrant filed in the case notes that it was issued as police investigated “stolen or embezzled property.”

“There’s only two people on this planet who know who leaked this report—me and the guy who leaked it,” Carmody said.

The raid on Carmody’s home and office drew wide First Amendment-related attention in the Bay Area over the weekend. And it added a new twist to the intrigue that surrounded the death of Adachi, who had built up a high profile as a public defender in the 16 years he had held the office.

The only elected public defender in California, Adachi was known as an watchdog on police misconduct. His death, on Feb. 22, at the age of 59, was attributed in early reports to a heart attack.

Then more information came to light.

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FREE MARKETS

China is targeting free market economists. Researchers with the Unirule Institute of Economics have been harassed for months, reports Bloomberg:

Unirule is the brainchild of Mao Yushi, a respected 90-year-old economist who was among the first scholars to spread free-market ideas such as deregulation and privatization within China. Until recently, the think tank was one of the country’s more influential nongovernmental organizations, benefiting from the relative liberty granted to economics since the rule of Deng Xiaoping, who once declared that he didn’t care “if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.” So long as they stayed mostly clear of politics, scholars were free to discuss Western thinkers and how their ideas applied to China. The result was a vibrant intellectual community that interacted with government decision-makers, providing data-driven reality checks for officials with little experience outside the Communist Party.

That space has shrunk drastically under President Xi Jinping, who has forcefully reasserted the party’s power and the state’s economic role, and has attacked the civil society that emerged under his predecessors.

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QUICK HITS

• Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) talks about Trump’s trade tactics on ABC’s The Week, saying that tariffs are negating the gains seen from recent tax cuts and “the longer we’re involved in a tariff battle or a trade war, the better chance there is we could actually enter into a recession because of it.”
• Eek: Biden-Harris 2020?
• Arizona has legalized nunchucks.
• “Banning immigrants’ languages can backfire. Just ask Ohio and Indiana,” says The Washington Post.
• A federal judge rules against a 2018 Kentucky law banning the most common kind of second-trimester abortion procedure.
• More and more Democrats are calling for federal action to break up Facebook.
• Sweden says it will reopen the rape case against Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, who was recently ousted from the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
• A new lawsuit challenges Houston’s ban on feeding the homeless.

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Turkish election officials have thrown out the results of an election for Istanbul’s mayor. Turkey’s ruling AKP party contested the election after the results showed them losing the mayor’s seat for the first time in 25 years. Mehmet Bekaroğlu, a member of the CHP party, whose candidate won the election, said AKP officials threatened election officials with prison if they did not vote to overturn the election. A new mayoral election will be held in June.

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From Daurbigney v. Liberty Personal Ins. Co. (La. Ct. App. May 9):

The recent race for a seat on the Louisiana Supreme Court between two sitting judges, Judge Marilyn Castle on the trial court and Judge Jimmy Genovese on the appellate court, was especially contentious. Campaign ads in the print and broadcast media funded by special interest groups escalated, costing the respective candidates’ campaigns large sums of money. Such a campaign ad is the focus of the case before us, only the ad was directed by a candidate not against her opponent and not even against the PAC supporting her opponent, but directed against specifically named lawyers who contributed to the PAC.

In the ad at issue, The Committee to Elect Judge Marilyn Castle, designed, authorized and ran an ad that specifically listed named lawyers who concentrate in the area of plaintiff personal injury litigation, claiming that her opponent’s judicial *impartiality had been compromised. The ad specifically named trial lawyers who “unethically” contributed large sums to his campaign, bypassing campaign finance limits on contributions by creating a special PAC to donate large sums to her opponent’s campaign over and above campaign finance limits. PAC contributions, however, are clearly authorized by the Citizens United case and are neither unlawful nor unethical. In fact, public records of campaign financial reports, of which we take judicial notice, show that both campaigns received PAC contributions and/or PACs ran ads on their behalf. The ad in question stated in pertinent part:

“SHOULD PERSONAL INJURY LAWYERS PICK OUR NEXT SUPREME COURT JUSTICE Or should you? Personal Injury Lawyers have contributed over $ 1,000,000 to Jimmy Genovese’s campaign. Then, when ethics laws prevented them from giving more, 18 of the wealthiest of them poured another $ 945,000 into a PAC (Restore Our Coast) created to promote Genovese’s campaign.”

It is significant to note that this particular campaign ad was run prominently in the Daily Advertiser, the Lafayette newspaper in Judge Castle’s “home base,” so to speak, on November 6, 2016, only two days before the election on November 8, 2016. As shown in the exhibit, the ad featured Judge Castle, pictured in color in her judicial robes, smiling and wearing a large cross, while it portrayed her opponent in dark tones, frowning with a sack of money symbol next to the names of the “wealthy” personal injury attorneys accused of trying to “Pick Our Next Supreme Court Justice.”

The law firm of Broussard & David, plaintiff/relator’s counsel, was the only Lafayette law firm specifically listed in the ad, although their contribution to the PAC in question had been made by a company they managed, 557 Jefferson Street, LLC, and not their law firm directly. It is also significant to note that the campaign ad was paid for directly by Judge Castle’s campaign, not a competing PAC. Thus, as the candidate, Judge Castle was personally responsible for the content of the ad.

Under these circumstances, the court said, Judge Castle had to recuse from cases involving Broussard & David:

Using the objective [Due Process Clause] test articulated by the U.S. Supreme Court, the question at issue now is: Does the tone and tenor of the ad, with Judge Castle’s color picture in her judicial robes and cross, and her direct involvement in this campaign ad naming specific plaintiff personal injury attorneys, including Broussard & David, lead the reasonable person to conclude that, “Recusal is required when, objectively speaking, ‘the probability of actual bias on the part of the judge or decisionmaker is too high to be constitutionally tolerable.'” …

The question really is not whether Judge Castle will tilt her ruling against the client because she still may be resentful of Broussard & David’s financial support of her opponent through a PAC. One would like to believe that Judge Castle, who is reputed to be an honest, hardworking and conscientious trial judge, would try to do her best to decide the issues in the Valencia Daurbigney case fairly and impartially. However, under the recent jurisprudential standards on recusals, no “actual bias” need be proven…. As the Supreme Court in Caperton states, “the question is whether, ‘under a realistic appraisal of psychological tendencies and human weakness,’ the interest ‘poses such a risk of actual bias or prejudgment that the practice must be forbidden if the guarantee of due process is to be adequately implemented.'” …

The gravamen of the recusal motion is not that Broussard & David contributed to a PAC supporting Judge Castle’s opponent and the defendant seeks recusal on that basis. Rather, the problem in this case is that the ad in question did not directly attack Judge Castle’s opponent, but instead singled out specific lawyers who concentrate in the area of plaintiff personal injury litigation, including Broussard & David, for allegedly unethically creating a PAC specifically for the purpose of bypassing campaign limits on contributions to a judicial campaign in an “unethical attempt” to “Pick Our Next Supreme Court Justice.” As previously noted, the contributions by PACs are neither illegal nor unethical. The ad in question chills and challenges the legal ability of lawyers or anyone to contribute to judicial campaigns through PACs under the First Amendment, contributions lawful since Citizens United and its progeny were decided….

Public trust and confidence in the judiciary is already suffering. Looking at this case objectively, given the optics, the tone, timing and wording of the ad, it is implausible that this client, or any reasonable client under the circumstances, could have trust and confidence in the impartiality of the trial judge when the sitting trial judge hearing her case has published such an ad directly naming and attacking her attorneys….

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Before we got married way back in 2000, my wife and I decided we didn’t want children. As a transhumanist, I would sometimes quip, “We’ll have kids when we’re younger.” My nontranshumanist wife usually responded to this witticism with slightly exasperated eye rolling.

Now it’s the 2050s and I’m about to celebrate my 100th birthday. Forty-some years ago, Harvard geneticist George Church predicted that researchers would be able to reverse aging in humans sometime in the early 2020s. That was a bit optimistic, but he wasn’t too far off. As a result, millions of us survived into the modern era, in which rejuvenation researchers have achieved longevity “escape velocity”: Life expectancy now increases by more than one year for every additional year of anti-aging research that’s conducted.

Due to advances in anti-senescence and age reversal treatments, I’m now physically much younger—about age 30—and have the energy and focus to devote to rearing a child.

While my also-younger wife is still disinclined toward motherhood, she has recently agreed that it would be OK if I were to become a father. So I’m exploring the idea of becoming a monoparent. Happily, mid-21st century science makes this possible.

Reproductive technologies have evolved in much the way Stanford University bioethicist Henry Greely outlined back in 2016. In his book The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction, Greely foresaw that most people would use gametes derived from their skin cells to create scores of in vitro-fertilized embryos. He accurately predicted that by the 2050s and ’60s, half of all American babies would be born through “easy pre-implantation genetic diagnosis,” or Easy PGD.

Why are more people choosing Easy PGD in 2050? Because parents can choose among embryos based on a preferred combination of genetic traits. Among other things, you can avoid having children afflicted with debilitating genetic diseases. And because the gametes can be derived from one or two people’s skin cells, you don’t even need a conventional partner! That allows monoparental reproduction but also makes it feasible for same-sex couples to have offspring genetically related to both parents.

Easy PGD is distinct from cloning, in which unchanged cellular nuclei from a single parent are installed in enucleated eggs to produce embryos. Of course, we also have cloning now. The genomes of the parent and the cloned child essentially make them age-separated identical twins.

Call me old-fashioned, but I’m more comfortable with Easy PGD. Gametes created from my skin cells would be much like those created via the natural process of meiosis: Bits of my chromosomes undergo recombination such that when a skin cell is transformed into gametes, the set of chromosomes in each daughter cell contains a mixture of my genetic traits but not necessarily the same mixture as in the other daughter cells. In other words, unlike clones, monoparental children are not genetically identical to their mother or father.

Once my skin-cell gametes are combined to produce embryos, their whole genomes will be sequenced to see exactly what combination of genetic traits they carry. Each one will then be analyzed to generate polygenic risk scores. That process assesses multiple genetic variants that together are used to predict the embryo’s chance of developing a disease, being taller than average, or doing well in school. Reproduction technicians can even feed the embryos’ genome sequences into a phenotype reader that will generate a picture of how each one would likely look at age 18.

It’s at this stage that my reproductionists and I would discuss how to use gene-editing to correct undesirable mutations and enhance the most promising embryos. I already know I carry gene variants that predispose me to conditions such as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, age-related macular degeneration, and substance abuse. Although modern medical treatments keep these problems under control, it would be better if my future daughter, through gene tweaks, could avoid them altogether.

Although much progress has been made, ectogenesis—growing embryos in artificial wombs—is still not possible. Fortunately, gestational surrogacy is widely practiced and well-compensated. The old legal confusions have been resolved, and it is now universally agreed that the genetic parents are legally responsible for the rearing of children born to surrogates.

I have not completely made up my mind to pursue monoparenthood, but there’s no particular hurry. Barring accidents, I’m likely to remain physically young and live many more decades yet.

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Daenerys “Stormborn” Targaryen, First of Her Name, Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Protector of the Seven Kingdoms, Conqueror of Mereen, the Unburnt, Breaker of Chains, Mother of Dragons… and Mass-Murderer of the Innocent.

On tonight’s penultimate episode of Game of Thrones, Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s favorite character stared relatively bloodless victory in the face and spat at it, preferring to burn King’s Landing to the ground. Man or woman, old or young, friend or enemy, innocent or evil—in the end, none of these distinctions mattered to the Dragon Queen.

Daenerys’s turn to the Westerosi equivalent of the Dark Side of the Force was far too rushed: The writers even had the nerve to edit a montage of various characters recalling Daeny’s capacity for cruelty during the “previously on” segment. But it wasn’t a complete surprise. Indeed, Daeny has always made good use of the Targaryen motto fire and blood: She burned the Dothraki chieftains, crucified Mereen’s nobility, and executed Westerosi lords who defied her. Despite her high-minded claims—all that breaking-the-wheel-nonsense—Daeny clearly practices a fiery form of collective punishment.

There’s a lesson here, buried somewhere in the rubble of King’s Landing: Power is a corrupting force, and when push comes to shove, well-intentioned leaders equipped with weapons of mass destruction are not so different from the tyrants they seek to topple. Daeny isn’t really an improvement over Cersei: Indeed, the latter’s act of explosive vengeance was surgical and restrained compared to what we just witnessed. Stripped of her power, Cersei was once again portrayed as sympathetic, trying desperately to succeed at the most noble goal: protecting her young. Here too, Thrones seemed to be saying that it was political power that poisoned Cersei. Vulnerable once again, she seemed almost human.

Farewell, Cersei—and Jaime, Sandor Clegane, Euron, Qyburn (RIP: Westeros’s Scientific Revolution), and, of course, Varys. Varys, who met his end trying to stop Daeny’s madness, once warned that Petyr Baelish was dangerous because he would gladly watch the world burn “so long as he could be king of the ashes.” A version of this fear has now come to pass: The ashes, it seems, will have a queen.

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Harvard University’s administration has unilaterally surrendered to a mob of student-activists demanding the termination of Law Professor Ronald Sullivan as faculty dean of Winthrop House, an undergraduate residence, over his “trauma-inducing” decision to join Harvey Weinstein’s legal defense team.

“I am writing to let you know that Ronald Sullivan and Stephanie Robinson will not be continuing as your Faculty Deans when their term ends on June 30, 2019,” Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana wrote in an email to Winthrop House students on Saturday.

Robinson is Sullivan’s wife, and co-faculty dean of Winthrop House. They were the first African Americans to serve in this position.

Sullivan, who remains a Harvard law professor, is a man with quite a resume: He advised Sen. Barack Obama on criminal justice issues in 2008, represented the family of Michael Brown in their suit against the city of Ferguson, Missouri, and is responsible for the release of more than 6,000 wrongfully incarcerated people. His clients have included accused murderers and terrorists, consistent with the liberal principle that everyone accused of a crime deserves expert legal representation.

But in the wake of Sullivan’s decision to serve as legal counsel for Weinstein, Harvard student-activists have embraced a different view. Danu Mudannayake, one the students leading the campaign to remove Sullivan, described the professor’s representation of Weinstein as “not only upsetting, but deeply trauma-inducing” and evidence that he “does not value the safety of students he lives with in Winthrop House.” According to Mudannayake and her fellow radicals, Sullivan has made Harvard an unsafe and hostile educational environment.

These are absurd accusations, and Khurana foolishly gave credence to them when he agreed to investigate Sullivan a few weeks ago. This was bad enough, but the results of that investigation are worse: Sullivan and Robinson are out.

“This is a regrettable situation and a very hard decision to make,” wrote Khurana in his mealy-mouthed statement.

Their sudden firings evidently shocked Sullivan and Robinson.

“We are surprised and dismayed by the action Harvard announced today,” they said in a statement. “We believed the discussions we were having with high-level university representatives were progressing in a positive manner, but Harvard unilaterally ended those talks.”

Mudannayake was also caught by surprise, though the news has delighted her.

“My honest reaction is just completely gobsmacked, but in the best way,” she told The New York Times. “I’m very proud today of our college and our college’s administration for finally choosing to do the right thing.” She described the atmosphere as “celebratory.”

This is a disaster. The administration has endorsed the ridiculous notion that serving as legal counsel for a person accused of sexual misconduct is itself a form of sexual misconduct, or at the very least contributes to sexual harassment on campus. It is no exaggeration to say that Khurana has undermined one of the most important principles of modern, enlightened justice. He should be ashamed of himself.

By caving to the mob, Harvard has shown student-activists that it takes seriously their demands for a kind of broadly-defined safety that includes protection from ideas they don’t like. This outcome will undoubtedly embolden them.

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I haven’t followed the Barr subpoena controversy closely (and I didn’t follow the Holder controversy, back in the day), but I trust Prof. McConnell’s judgment a great deal, so I thought I’d pass along his National Review Online article:

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has declared it a “constitutional crisis” that Attorney General William Barr refuses to divulge the small parts of the Mueller report that contain grand-jury material. By a straight party-line vote, the House Judiciary Committee voted to hold Barr in contempt of Congress.

What did Pelosi think when Barr’s predecessor, Eric Holder, refused to divulge documents to a congressional committee and was held in contempt? “Ridiculous!” she said. What did Holder and Obama say? That the House subpoena was a violation of “separation of powers.” …

What is the legal or constitutional difference between Holder’s refusal to provide documents and Barr’s?

Here is the background of the Holder contempt. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE), a unit of Holder’s Department of Justice (DOJ), conducted an operation called “Fast & Furious,” intended to track illegal gun sales. In fact it put hundreds of weapons in the hands of Mexican criminal gangs, leading to the death of an American officer. On February 4, 2011, after news of the operation emerged, Holder’s assistant attorney general sent a letter to Congress declaring that the Obama administration had no knowledge of the operation. This letter was false, as Holder later admitted….

On June 19, 2012, President Obama invoked executive privilege, and on the same day, the House committee voted to hold Attorney General Holder in contempt of Congress. The committee vote was 23–17. The full House voted Holder in contempt by a lopsided vote of 255–67, with 17 Democrats voting for the contempt and many more staying home to avoid having to cast a vote.

How does this compare with the Barr contempt? Under regulations written by the Clinton administration, the special prosecutor is instructed to submit a “confidential” report to the attorney general at the end of an investigation. It is entirely the prerogative of the attorney general to decide whether to release any of the report to the public or to Congress. In his discretion, Attorney General Barr decided to release the Mueller report in its entirety, but for two categories of redactions, which were made in conjunction with the Mueller team.

One set of redactions protected innocent third parties, “peripheral to the investigation,” whose privacy would be compromised. Barr offered to let members of Congress see a version of the report without these redactions. Five Republicans have accepted the offer, but no Democrats.

The second set of redactions, amounting to an estimated 1.5 percent of the report, applied to grand-jury materials….

That’s just an excerpt—read the whole thing.

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Some time in the future, I hope Mother’s Day will be celebrated by having the kids wait in the car while mom runs into Starbucks to get a latte.

This would be a joyous way to reclaim a parental right that has all but disappeared: the right to convenience. Somehow, moms—and dads, too, but let’s talk about moms, since they generally do more of the caregiving and this is their weekend—have been subtly and not-so-subtly informed that doing anything a slightly easier way is tantamount to neglect.

This is done by danger-izing the convenience: pretending that the parenting hack or pleasant practice is actually a threat to the child’s wellbeing. Moms, for instance, are strongly encouraged, even hectored, to breastfeed, even though formula-fed babies turn out fine. (I’m one of them.) A few years ago, the CDC told women between the ages of about 13 and 50 never to sip a single, relaxing drink, just in case they happen to be pregnant—as if all kids are one beer away from fetal alcohol syndrome. (They aren’t.) And then there’s the big kahuna of convenience: car waits.

Moms are routinely harassed and sometimes charged with a crime if they let their kids wait in the car even for a few minutes. The ostensible reason is that cars heat up quickly and a child could die from hyperthermia.  But statistically, more kids die in parking lots than in parked cars. (And they die when forgotten in a car for hours, not in the brief moments while mom is picking up the pizza.)

The authorities have criminalized the safer approach. Why? Because making mom take the kids along for the errand signals devotion. She has inconvenienced herself. A five minute in-and-out jaunt is transformed into the mini-ordeal of possibly waking the child, unbuckling the car seat, strapping on a hat, securing them in a baby carrier or making the triplets all hold hands, and taking them (sometimes wailing) into the establishment, maybe in the rain, maybe in the snow, maybe in the dark—and trying to do all that again on the way back while juggling some packages.

Most of us remember waiting in the car while our moms did some shopping, and it wasn’t a Guantanamo experience. It was part of being a kid. And part of being a mom was being allowed not to be with the kids every second of every day, demonstrating, Kabuki-like, that they have put everything else on hold to overprotect their youngsters

That’s why the neglect laws need to be clearer and saner. As lawyer Diane Redleaf, a longtime champion of families and now special counsel to Let Grow, notes, “There are vague laws in just about every state that give discretion to child protection investigators and police to label a parent’s actions that were done for convenience as ‘neglectful supervision,’ ‘risk of harm,’ ‘child endangerment,’ or ‘environmental neglect.’  These laws need to be narrowed. Instead of amorphous standards, we need real legal protections for families.”

This idea is neither cruel nor selfish nor risky. It is reasonable and smart to prioritize convenience when children are not in danger. Neglect should be limited to “blatant disregard of obvious danger” and not rational decisions that—horrors!—afford a mom some convenience.

When lawmakers, police officers, child protection workers, and passersby with 911 on speed dial recognize that convenience is not a crime, we will lift a latte and toast to a Mother’s Day gift even sweeter than chocolate chip pancakes in bed.

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Like so many of the best socialist products, Marcus Pfister’s The Rainbow Fish has been a runaway capitalist success. The children’s classic, in which the most brightly colored fish in the ocean finds happiness only after handing over all but one of his glittering scales under duress to the gray grumps around him, has sold since its 1992 debut more than 30 million copies worldwide.

Whereas Rainbow Fish achieves transcendence through literally becoming colorless, the exact opposite was the case for The Rainbow Fish. Using an expensive and novel combination of holographic foil stamping and watercolor, the Swiss-born Pfister and his publisher, NorthSouth Books, produced a striking visual package that proved irresistible.

“The effect of the stamping was so nice that all the bookshops here in Switzerland put it in the windows,” Pfister recalled in a 2013 interview with Publisher’s Weekly. “We decided that I’d get only 50 percent of my usual royalties for the book, and only that way was it possible to make it work.” Looks like a win-win.

Except for some of us parents, that is. Like countless toddler wranglers, I ended up with a copy of The Rainbow Fish around the house—gift, hand-me-down, who knows?—when my firstborn was getting out of diapers, and it took me all of one reading to understand why the former conservative radio host Neal Boortz 12 years ago called it not just “insidious” but “one of the biggest pieces of trash children’s books ever published.” (Boortz’s anti-Rainbow animus became so legendary that it sparked a response publication of sorts, called Starboortz Fish, in which a dull starfish is counseled that in order to truly shine he must earn the honor through industriously using what competitive advantages he already has.)

Libertarians won’t last long in this world taking easy umbrage at the statist culture around them. And as the unwilling recipient of more political children’s books than my mind has been able to successfully scrub, I can testify that kiddie propaganda in the other direction can be gruesome, too. But Pfister’s blockbuster—which was spun off into an animated TV series, plus several sequels—is toxic enough that I took the rare step of expelling it from my home.

Why? Start with the protagonist. He starts as “the most beautiful fish in the entire ocean,” but he refuses to talk or play with the other guppies, preferring instead to “glide past, proud and silent, letting his scales shimmer.” I mean, we’ve all known arrogant people, but don’t they usually try to leverage their inherited gifts into some kind of (advantageous-to-them) social interaction?

Instead, he whines about not having any friends. A quest ensues to meet the wise and scary octopus, who advises: “Give a glittering scale to each of the other fish. You will no longer be the most beautiful fish in the sea, but you will discover how to be happy.”

This, it turns out, is a counsel to pay ransom—because on previous pages we learned that his fellow fish shun Rainbow not because he won’t play with them but because he refused a request from one of them to “give me one of your shiny scales. They are so wonderful, and you have so many.” Sure, the colorful fella’s a jerk, but he only gets truly ostracized because he won’t hand over his body parts on demand, in the name of equality.

After Rainbow Fish dutifully relinquishes a shiny scale to a grateful swimmer, the other fish mob him to insist on their fair share. “His most prized possessions had been given away, yet he was very happy,” Pfister concludes after the giveaway. Only then do the other fish invite him back to play.

There is exactly one good moral to be gleaned from these shimmery blue pages: Don’t be imperious about your inherited advantages. The rest is the kind of thuggishly naive utopianism that not even John Lennon believed anymore a few months after releasing “Imagine.”

But in these times of democratic socialism and ideological abstractions untethered to real-world habits, The Rainbow Fish may have more resonance than ever. It takes genuine artistic and marketing talent, plus the almost magical trade routes made possible by international capitalism (the book has been translated into more than 50 languages), to sell redistribution fantasia to so many millions in exchange for their own hard-earned money. Physical and sociological intimidation was, thankfully, not enough. Kids may as well learn now: Incoherent insincerity can make you rich, if you work hard enough.

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