The Road to Serfdom Starts at Bedtime

Red Moon Rising: A Hayekian Deconstruction of Goodnight Moon’s Collectivist Indoctrination

By Scott Zachary

In 1947—the same year the Mont Pelerin Society gathered to defend free-market principles against the rising tide of collectivism—Margaret Wise Brown published what would become the most successful piece of Marxist propaganda ever smuggled into American homes. Goodnight Moon has sold over 48 million copies, been translated into a dozen languages, and been read to multiple generations of children at their most psychologically vulnerable moment: bedtime, when critical thinking is at its lowest ebb and suggestibility peaks.

I’m not saying Margaret Wise Brown was a conscious agent of the Comintern (though her connections to the progressive education movement and her time at the Bureau of Educational Experiments are… interesting). What I’m arguing is that Goodnight Moon functions—intentionally or not—as a primer for accepting centralized control, passive consumption, and the suppression of individual agency. It normalizes a command economy where resources are allocated by fiat, production is absent, and the individual submits to authority without question.

As someone who’s spent considerable time studying Austrian economics (and who has a daughter who demanded this book nightly for eighteen months), I feel uniquely positioned to expose the insidious nature of what passes for innocent children’s literature. What follows is a systematic analysis of how Goodnight Moon undermines every principle of free-market economics and prepares young minds for a life of dependence on the state.

Fair warning: once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

I. The Great Green Room: A Planned Economy in Miniature

The book opens with a detailed inventory of the “great green room.” Let’s examine what we’re shown:

• A telephone
• A red balloon
• Two kittens
• A pair of mittens
• A young mouse
• A full moon
• A cow jumping over the moon (in a picture)
• Three bears sitting on chairs (in a picture)
• A bowl full of mush
• A quiet old lady whispering “hush”

This is presented as simply existing. No explanation of how these goods arrived in the room. No discussion of trade, production, or voluntary exchange. The child simply has these things, as if they materialized through central planning rather than market processes.

The Austrian Critique:

Mises spent significant portions of Human Actionexplaining why economic calculation is impossible under socialism—without price signals generated by voluntary exchange, there’s no rational way to allocate resources. The great green room exists in this exact state of economic impossibility.

How did the telephone get there? Who manufactured it? What was its price relative to, say, the red balloon? Did the child’s family trade labor or capital to acquire it? These questions are deliberately left unanswered because answering them would require acknowledging that goods don’t simply appear through bureaucratic fiat—they require production, trade, and the price mechanism to signal their relative scarcity and value.

The inventory format itself mimics Soviet-style central planning documents. We’re given a static list of goods as if some State Planning Committee determined that this child requires exactly one telephone, one red balloon, two kittens, and a bowl of mush. No more, no less. The idea that the child (or the child’s family) might prefer two red balloons and no telephone—or that they might trade the mittens for additional mush—is literally unthinkable within the book’s framework.

The Fatal Conceit:

Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit warned against the presumption that any single mind could possess all the knowledge necessary to organize an economy. Yet this is precisely what the “quiet old lady” represents: a central planner who presumes to know the optimal bedtime, the correct order for saying goodnight to objects, and the proper allocation of the child’s attention.

Notice that nowhere does the child express what economists call “time preference”—the subjective valuation of present versus future goods. The child doesn’t say “I’d prefer to stay up another hour because I’m not tired” or “I’d like to read a different book because Goodnight Moon has declining marginal utility after the eighty-seventh reading this month.”

No. The child submits to the plan. The old lady has decided bedtime is now, and the child’s preferences are irrelevant.

This is central planning in its purest form.

II. The Absence of Property Rights and the Tragedy of the Commons

Let’s talk about ownership—or rather, the complete absence of any discussion of ownership.

Who owns the great green room?

The book never says. We assume the child lives there, but there’s no indication of property rights. Is this the child’s room? The family’s room? Common space subject to use by any member of the household? Without clear property rights, we can’t have functioning markets, voluntary exchange, or rational resource allocation.

And then there’s the matter of public goods that receive equal billing with private goods:

• “Goodnight moon”
• “Goodnight stars”
• “Goodnight air”
• “Goodnight noises everywhere”

The moon, stars, and air are non-excludable public goods. You can’t own them, fence them off, or charge people for their use. These are textbook examples of goods that exist outside market mechanisms. By treating them as equivalent to private goods like the brush and the mush, the book normalizes the idea that all goods—whether rivalrous and excludable or not—should be treated identically.

This is economically illiterate. It also happens to be the foundation of every argument for socializing private property. “If we can’t own the moon, why should anyone own a factory?”

The Coase Theorem Goes Unmentioned:

Ronald Coase won a Nobel Prize for demonstrating that, given clearly defined property rights and low transaction costs, private parties can negotiate efficient solutions to externalities without government intervention. The great green room contains numerous potential externality problems:

• The kittens playing with the mittens (property damage?)
• The “noises everywhere” (noise pollution?)
• The light from the moon and stars (light pollution affecting sleep?)

But because property rights are undefined, there’s no framework for addressing these issues through voluntary negotiation. The only solution is imposed authority: the old lady whispering “hush.” She doesn’t negotiate with the noise-makers. She doesn’t compensate them for their foregone utility in making noise. She simply imposes silence by bureaucratic decree.

This is the classic statist solution: when property rights are unclear, empower an authority figure to impose order rather than allowing spontaneous order to emerge through voluntary cooperation.

III. The Surveillance State and the Suppression of Spontaneous Order

Let’s address the old lady more directly, because she’s the most sinister element of the entire apparatus.

“A quiet old lady whispering hush.”

This is how she’s introduced. Not as “grandmother” or “mother” or any familial relation that might justify her authority. She’s simply there, watching, monitoring, enforcing compliance with the bedtime ritual. Her role is purely supervisory—she produces nothing, contributes nothing to the economy of the room, but exists solely to ensure adherence to the plan.

If this doesn’t immediately remind you of a Stasi informant or an NKVD apparatchik, you haven’t read enough Solzhenitsyn.

The Suppression of Individual Action:

Throughout the book, the child performs no independent actions. The child doesn’t choose what to say goodnight to. The child doesn’t decide when to go to sleep. The child is guided through a ritualized sequence of state-approved behaviors, monitored at every step by the quiet old lady.

This is the opposite of what Hayek called “spontaneous order”—the idea that complex social coordination can emerge from individuals pursuing their own ends without central direction. A child’s natural sleep cycle is a form of spontaneous order. Given freedom, the child would become drowsy, lose interest in stimulating activities, and eventually sleep when their body’s circadian rhythms signaled readiness.

But no. The great green room operates on imposed order. Bedtime occurs when the old lady decrees it occurs, following a rigid ritual that must be performed identically every night. The child’s subjective preferences—what economists call “ordinal utility”—are irrelevant.

The “Hush” as Censorship:

The old lady’s sole action in the book is to whisper “hush.” This is literally an act of censorship—the suppression of speech and noise. In a free society, the child might negotiate bedtime (“Five more minutes?”), or the kittens might continue playing, or the noises might continue “everywhere.”

But the old lady’s whispered “hush” forecloses all negotiation, all spontaneous activity, all expressions of individual preference. It’s a totalitarian’s dream: a population that has internalized the need for silence, compliance, and submission to authority.

And the child learns this lesson at the most formative possible moment, right before sleep, when the day’s final impressions are being encoded into long-term memory.

Chilling? Yes. But also brilliant propaganda technique.

IV. The Demonization of Productive Activity and Capital Accumulation

Here’s what you won’t find anywhere in Goodnight Moon:

• Anyone working
• Anyone producing anything
• Anyone engaged in trade or commerce
• Any tools of production (capital goods)
• Any discussion of how the goods in the room were acquired
• Any entrepreneurs or business owners
• Any indication that wealth must be created before it can be consumed

The great green room is a pure consumption space. Everything has already been produced (somehow, somewhere, by someone who is neither acknowledged nor compensated within the narrative). The child consumes the mush. The child benefits from the light of the moon. The kittens benefit from the mittens. The three bears sit idly on chairs.

No one produces anything. No one creates value. No one accumulates capital. The economy is entirely static—a snapshot of consumption with no backstory of production.

The Marxist Labor Theory of Value Lurks Here:

By refusing to acknowledge the production process, Goodnight Moon allows children to develop a fundamentally Marxist intuition: that goods simply exist, and the only question is how to distribute them fairly. If you never see the factory where the telephone was made, or the farm where the cow (jumping over the moon) was raised, or the labor that went into weaving the mittens, you naturally conclude that these things are just there, part of the natural landscape, and any distribution is as arbitrary as any other.

This is how you get generations of voters who think wealth is a fixed pie to be divided rather than something that must be continually created through innovation, investment, and productive labor.

The Cow Jumping Over the Moon as Anti-Capitalist Allegory:

The cow jumping over the moon appears in a picture on the wall—a reference to the nursery rhyme “Hey Diddle Diddle.” But consider what this image represents: spectacular, impossible, unproductive activity.

The cow doesn’t produce milk. It doesn’t plow fields. It doesn’t contribute to capital accumulation or economic growth. It performs an impossible feat that generates wonder but no actual value. This is precisely how socialists view entrepreneurship and innovation—as somehow “unnatural,” divorced from real productive activity, probably exploitative, definitely suspicious.

Meanwhile, the three bears “sitting on chairs” in another picture represent pure consumption without production. They’re not working. They’re not building. They’re just sitting, consuming the use-value of the chairs without any indication they contributed to producing those chairs.

This is the socialist dream: consumption without production, wealth without creation, comfort without effort.

V. The Egalitarian Distribution of “Goodnights” and the Rejection of Subjective Value

One of the core insights of Austrian economics—dating back to Carl Menger’s Principles of Economicsin 1871—is the subjective theory of value. Goods don’t have inherent, objective value. They have value based on how much satisfaction they provide to individual humans in specific circumstances.

A glass of water has immense value to someone dying of thirst in the desert. That same glass has negligible value to someone standing next to a lake. The water didn’t change. The human circumstances changed, and therefore the subjective valuation changed.

This is Economics 101. It’s also the foundation for understanding why free markets work—they allow individuals to signal their subjective valuations through voluntary exchange, generating price signals that coordinate economic activity.

Goodnight Moon rejects this entirely.

The Egalitarian Distribution:

Every object in the great green room receives exactly one “goodnight.” The telephone gets a goodnight. The red balloon gets a goodnight. The mush gets a goodnight. The noises everywhere get a goodnight.

Each receives equal recognition, equal attention, equal status in the ritual. There is no prioritization based on the child’s subjective preferences. There is no indication that the child values the telephone more than the mush, or the kittens more than the mittens. Everything is treated as equally valuable—or equally valueless, which amounts to the same thing.

This is not how humans actually think.

In reality, the child almost certainly has strong preferences. Maybe the child loves the kittens and tolerates the mush. Maybe the red balloon is a prized possession while the brush is merely utilitarian. Maybe the telephone represents connection to a beloved grandparent and thus has enormous sentimental value.

But the ritual demands equal treatment of all goods. This is the egalitarian impulse taken to its absurd logical conclusion: not just that all people deserve equal dignity (a defensible principle), but that all things deserve equal recognition regardless of their actual utility or the subjective value humans place on them.

Kittens and Mittens: A Case Study in False Equivalence:

“Goodnight kittens, goodnight mittens.”

These are paired—rhymed, actually—as if they’re comparable. But kittens are living creatures capable of providing companionship, emotional comfort, and dynamic interaction. Mittens are inanimate objects that provide warmth and nothing else. The subjective value a human derives from a kitten is orders of magnitude higher than from mittens (unless you’re in danger of frostbite, in which case your subjective valuation changes—proving the Austrian point about context-dependent value).

But the book treats them as equivalent. This is the socialist tendency to flatten all distinctions, to insist that because mittens and kittens both serve human needs, they’re fundamentally the same and deserve equal consideration in the grand scheme of things.

An Austrian economist recoils in horror. So should you.

VI. The Price Mechanism in Exile

Let’s talk about what’s missing from Goodnight Moon: prices.

How much did the brush cost? What about the comb? The bowl of mush? We don’t know, and we’re clearly not supposed to ask. The entire apparatus of market exchange—the voluntary trading of goods and services at mutually agreed prices—has been erased from the narrative.

Why This Matters:

Prices aren’t arbitrary numbers assigned to goods. They’re information-dense signals that coordinate economic activity across millions of people who will never meet or communicate directly. When the price of lumber rises, builders conserve lumber and look for substitutes. Lumber producers increase output. Landowners plant more trees for future harvest. All of this happens without anyone planning it, purely through the price mechanism.

F.A. Hayek called prices “the telecommunications system of the market economy.” By eliminating any discussion of prices, Goodnight Moon effectively shows children an economy where this telecommunications system doesn’t exist—which is to say, an economy that cannot possibly function.

The Bowl of Mush Problem:

“Goodnight mush.”

This is the only food mentioned in the book. A bowl of unspecified mush. We don’t know what it cost. We don’t know who prepared it. We don’t know if the child chose it or if it was assigned by the old lady. We don’t know if there’s more in the kitchen or if this is a rationed portion.

In a market economy, you’d expect some choice at dinner. “Would you like the mush or the stew?” “How hungry are you?” “If you’re still hungry after the mush, would you like some bread?” These questions require knowledge of prices (implicit or explicit) and allow the child to signal preferences, which then guide future resource allocation.

But no. There is mush. You eat the mush. You say goodnight to the mush. The mush exists in an economic void where questions of price, preference, and alternative uses of resources simply don’t apply.

This is how you get bread lines in the Soviet Union. When the price mechanism is abolished, you get whatever the central planner decided to produce, in whatever quantity the central planner allocated, and you say thank you because the alternative is starvation.

(I’m possibly overanalyzing a bowl of mush in a children’s book, but then again, the Holodomor killed four million Ukrainians because Stalin’s central planners couldn’t coordinate agricultural production without price signals, so maybe the mush is more important than it appears.)

VII. The Absence of Innovation, Creative Destruction, and Entrepreneurship

Joseph Schumpeter—not technically an Austrian, but close enough for our purposes—emphasized that capitalism’s genius lies not in efficient resource allocation but in “creative destruction”: the constant revolution of economic life as entrepreneurs introduce innovations that render old methods obsolete.

Goodnight Moon depicts the opposite: a completely static economy where nothing changes.

The Inventory Never Changes:

Every night, the same objects appear in the room. The same ritual unfolds. The same old lady whispers the same “hush.” There is no innovation, no improvement, no entrepreneur saying “What if we tried a different bedtime story?” or “What if the child didn’t need to say goodnight to every single object in the room?” or “What if we let market forces determine the optimal bedtime instead of imposing it by fiat?”

This is the Marxist dream of “scientific socialism”—a rationally planned economy where everything runs smoothly because the planners have figured out the One Correct Way to organize production and distribution. No messy competition. No disruptive entrepreneurs. No businesses failing because consumers chose better alternatives.

Just the great green room, exactly as it has always been, forever.

The Telephone as Dormant Capital:

There’s a telephone in the room. In the real world, a telephone represents accumulated capital (the infrastructure to transmit voice signals) and enables productive coordination (people talking to each other to arrange trade, employment, social cooperation). Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone as an entrepreneurial act that would revolutionize human communication and enable massive economic growth.

In Goodnight Moon, the telephone just sits there. No one uses it. It’s part of the room’s fixed inventory, like the furniture. It might as well be decorative for all the productive use it gets.

This is what happens in socialist economies: capital goods exist, but they’re allocated by planners who don’t face market signals, so they end up underutilized or misallocated. The Soviet Union had factories, but they produced shoddy goods no one wanted because the planners didn’t know (and couldn’t know) what consumers actually valued.

The telephone in the great green room is a metaphor for every factory, every tool, every bit of capital that exists in a planned economy but contributes nothing to human flourishing because it’s divorced from the market process.

VIII. The Central Planning of Time and the Rejection of Individual Autonomy

Let’s return to the core issue: bedtime is imposed, not chosen.

Time Preference and Individual Liberty:

Austrian economists emphasize “time preference”—the degree to which individuals value present satisfaction versus future satisfaction. Some people are patient (low time preference): they’ll sacrifice today to invest for tomorrow. Others are impatient (high time preference): they want satisfaction now.

Neither is wrong. They’re subjective preferences, and in a free society, individuals make choices that reflect their own time preference. You might stay up late tonight because you value the present enjoyment of finishing a book more than the future benefit of being well-rested tomorrow. That’s your choice, and you bear the consequences.

Goodnight Moon eliminates this choice entirely.

The child doesn’t decide when to sleep. The old lady decides. The ritual proceeds on a fixed schedule. The child’s subjective time preference—“I’m not tired yet” or “I’d like to stay up and play”—is irrelevant. Bedtime is centrally planned, imposed from above, enforced by the quiet old lady’s supervisory presence.

This is Hayekian Dystopia:

In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek warned that central planning doesn’t stop with economic decisions. Once you vest power in planners to make decisions “for the people,” those planners must control more and more aspects of life to make the plan work. You can’t plan the economy without planning education (to produce the workers you need). You can’t plan education without planning leisure (to prevent subversive ideas). You can’t plan leisure without planning bedtime.

The old lady has decided when the child sleeps. Having made that decision, she must now control the child’s attention (the goodnight ritual), the child’s speech (hush), and the child’s activities (no playing after the ritual begins). Each additional control is justified by the previous control. This is the slippery slope of central planning in miniature.

Rothbard Would Have Blocked This Book:

Murray Rothbard was the most radical of the Austrians, arguing for the complete elimination of state authority in favor of voluntary cooperation. He would have looked at the old lady’s imposition of bedtime and seen exactly what he spent his career fighting: an authority figure using power to override individual choice “for your own good.”

Maybe the child needs sleep. Maybe staying up late would be harmful. But in a Rothbardian framework, the child (or the child’s parents, as guardians of the child’s interests) should make that determination through voluntary choice, not have it imposed by an external authority whose presence is justified purely by their role as enforcer of the plan.

The quiet old lady has no skin in the game. She’s not the one who will be tired tomorrow if bedtime is delayed. She’s a bureaucrat, insulated from the consequences of her decisions, wielding power purely because the system has designated her as the enforcer of bedtime.

This is every government agency that ever claimed to know better than individuals how to live their own lives.

IX. The Normalization of Passive Acceptance and Learned Helplessness

Here’s the most insidious part of Goodnight Moon: it trains children to accept their circumstances without question.

The Child Never Resists:

Throughout the book, the child performs the ritual. No negotiation. No objection. No “Why do I have to say goodnight to the mush?” or “Can I skip the mittens tonight?” The child accepts the program without resistance.

This is learned helplessness: the psychological state where individuals stop trying to change their circumstances because they’ve learned that resistance is futile. Martin Seligman demonstrated this in dogs—if you shock them randomly with no way to escape, they eventually stop trying to escape even when a way out becomes available. They’ve learned to be passive.

Goodnight Moon is bedtime learned helplessness.

The Entrepreneurial Spirit in Exile:

Entrepreneurs are people who see the world as it is and imagine how it could be different. They don’t accept “this is how things are done” as an answer. They ask “What if we tried something else?” They take risks, innovate, fail, learn, and try again.

The child in Goodnight Moon displays none of this spirit. The great green room is what it is. The ritual is what it is. The old lady enforces compliance, and the child complies. There is no experimentation, no testing of boundaries, no discovery of better alternatives.

This is how you create a population that accepts whatever the central planners decide. You train them young that the world is fixed, that authority knows best, that their role is to perform the assigned ritual and go to sleep.

Contrast With Market-Based Children’s Literature:

Consider The Cat in the Hat. Two children are bored on a rainy day (they have a problem). An entrepreneur (the Cat) arrives with an innovative solution (fun, chaos, excitement). There are costs and risks (the house gets trashed). There’s creative destruction (literally destroying the house’s organization). And ultimately there’s a reckoning when market forces reassert themselves (Mother coming home).

Dr. Seuss—who was himself pretty left-wing politically—nevertheless created stories that reflect market dynamics: innovation, risk-taking, creative destruction, consequences. The children in Dr. Seuss books make choices, experience trade-offs, and learn from outcomes.

The child in Goodnight Moon makes no choices and experiences no trade-offs. The child is a passive recipient of whatever the great green room and the quiet old lady provide.

This is the difference between capitalism (active, entrepreneurial, risk-taking) and socialism (passive, accepting, centrally planned).

X. The Absence of Community, Civil Society, and Voluntary Association

One more thing worth noting: the great green room is isolated.

No Neighbors, No Trade, No Community:

Hayek and other classical liberals emphasized that free societies aren’t just about individuals—they’re about the voluntary associations individuals form. Churches, clubs, businesses, friendships, families—these are the “little platoons” (Edmund Burke’s phrase) that mediate between the individual and the state, creating a rich civil society where people cooperate without coercion.

The great green room has none of this.

There’s the child and the old lady. That’s it. No friends coming over to play. No mention of a broader family. No community beyond the four walls. The room is hermetically sealed from any larger social context.

This is the atomized individual of totalitarian fantasy: isolated, disconnected from organic social bonds, dependent entirely on the authority figure for structure and meaning. No competing loyalties (what if the child wants to stay up to talk to Grandpa?). No alternative sources of value or meaning (what if the child prefers a different bedtime story?). Just the child, the room, and the enforcer.

The Telephone That Never Rings:

This makes the telephone even more tragic. It’s a device for connection, for reaching beyond the room to communicate with others—but it never rings. No one calls. The child doesn’t use it. It’s just there, a symbol of potential community that remains forever unrealized.

In a free society, the telephone would be ringing. Grandparents checking in. Friends making plans. The church announcing potluck schedules. Trade and social cooperation happening organically through voluntary communication.

In the great green room, the telephone is silent. There is only the ritual, the old lady, and submission to the plan.

XI. Conclusion: The Road to Serfdom Starts at Bedtime

I want to be clear about what I’m arguing here.

I’m not claiming Margaret Wise Brown was a Marxist agent (though her progressive credentials are a matter of record). I’m not saying Goodnight Moon has consciously caused the growth of socialist sentiment in America (though the timing is suspicious—published 1947, just as the Cold War was beginning, and every American child since has been indoctrinated with it).

What I’m arguing is that Goodnight Moon normalizes every instinct that makes socialism possible:

• Accepting goods as given rather than understanding they must be produced
• Treating all goods as equal regardless of subjective value
• Submitting to authority without question
• Accepting central planning of time and activity
• Viewing innovation and change as absent or impossible
• Isolating individuals from voluntary community and market exchange
• Learning passivity rather than entrepreneurship

These aren’t lessons stated explicitly. They’re assumptions embedded in the structure of the story, absorbed by children at their most impressionable moment, reinforced night after night after night.

By the time these children grow up, they’ve been conditioned to find central planning natural, market exchange suspicious, and individual autonomy less important than compliance with the plan. They’ve learned that goods simply exist (so redistribution is just), that all preferences should be treated equally (so subjective value is meaningless), and that authority figures who monitor and control behavior are benign (so the regulatory state is welcome).

What’s the Alternative?

I’m not saying you should burn your copy of Goodnight Moon. (Though you could, and in a free society you have that right, which is more than you’d have under the system this book implicitly endorses.)

What I’m suggesting is that you read it with your eyes open. Notice what’s missing. Notice what’s normalized. And maybe, when your kid asks why they have to say goodnight to the mush, you take that opportunity to explain that the mush exists because a farmer grew grain, a miller ground it, a grocer sold it, and a parent prepared it—all coordinated through voluntary exchange and the price mechanism.

Tell them the telephone isn’t just a thing that exists—it’s accumulated capital that represents generations of innovation and investment. Tell them the great green room only functions because, somewhere outside its walls, people are producing goods, creating value, and trading freely.

Tell them about subjective value: that it’s okay to value the kittens more than the mittens, and that a free society respects those individual preferences instead of imposing egalitarian sameness.

Tell them about time preference: that choosing when to sleep is a choice about trading present satisfaction for future wellbeing, and that making those choices yourself—and bearing the consequences—is what freedom means.

Tell them about spontaneous order: that the best systems emerge from individuals freely cooperating, not from quiet old ladies whispering “hush.”

And then, if they still want to read Goodnight Moon, let them. In a free society, we don’t ban books. We just read them critically, with an understanding of what they’re actually saying beneath the surface.

But maybe—just maybe—also read them something with a few more entrepreneurs, a functioning price mechanism, and a protagonist who makes actual choices.

The future of liberty might depend on it.

Appendix: Recommended Free-Market Bedtime Reading

Since we’re all about offering alternatives rather than just criticizing, here are some children’s books that—while not explicitly Austrian—at least don’t train your children for life in a command economy:

• The Little Red Hen - Teaches that production precedes consumption and free-riders don’t get to share in the harvest
• Stone Soup - Voluntary exchange and trade create value for everyone involved
• The Giving Tree - Demonstrates the danger of unlimited altruism and the importance of sustainable resource management (okay, this one’s actually kind of depressing, but at least it engages with trade-offs)
• Horton Hatches the Egg - Keeping commitments and honoring contracts creates trust necessary for markets to function
• Any Dr. Seuss - Entrepreneurship, creative destruction, and learning from market feedback

Or just read them Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt and skip the metaphors entirely. Your three-year-old will thank you eventually.

Probably around the time they’re paying off student loans and realize the government promised them a great green room but delivered a massive debt burden instead.

The End

Scott Zachary is a recovering Goodnight Moon reader, father of six, and the struggling author of a libertarian post-cyberpunk novel he hopes to complete someday—probably after he gets a vasectomy. He took an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and believes that includes children’s books that normalize central planning.

He can be found on Reddit under various sock-puppet accounts where he gets in arguments with people about Austrian economics, sci-fi tropes, and the proper role of government, usually while sleep-deprived because his youngest demands Goodnight Moon every. Single. Night.

God help us all.