Money, Money, Honey Bunny!

As the father of a three-year old learning to read, I was completely dismayed at the endless number of inane, cutesy, and vapid titles targeted towards pre-school readers. How can we expect books about anthropomorphized talking animals and insects to teach our children anything useful about the world we live in? Last time I checked, mother hens did not wear aprons, ladybugs did not dispense homey pearls of wisdom, and frogs did not yearn for friendship from other species. I know many people believe such stories feed the imagination, encourage creativity, etc., but then so do Ulysses and Also sprach Zarathustra, and few would recommend teaching Joyce or Nietzsche to pre-schoolers. Considering my biases, I thought "Money, Money, Honey Bunny!" was simply another superfluous exercise in puerile nonsense, but I was pleasantly mistaken. Ms. Sadler must be a free-market capitalist at heart, for she has managed to capture its virtues in this simple tale of commerce, goods, and the pleasures of free trade. Honey Bunny, the title character, knows the value of saving. More important, however, she knows that money is not an end unto itself, but a means of trading goods and services using a common currency, allowing for wealth to spread from buyer to seller to manufacturer to investor and so on in the glorious cycle of money. How does she show this? Not with models of monetary theory, or lectures on microeconomics, but by earning, saving, judiciously spending, and then keeping a portion to invest in her own future. Ms. Sadler tells Honey Bunny's story in bouncy, rhyming couplets, accompanied by clear, colorful and often humorous illustrations by Mr. Bollen. My child delights in declaiming the catchy, singsongy verse and laughs at the cartoons, and I declaim and laugh with him. He thinks he is merely enjoying the simple tale of a cartoon rabbit, but I know that the seeds of free-market capitalism are being sown, watered, and grown within my progeny, guaranteeing his future prosperity and the prosperity of all in the world economy.