My solution — making raising your own children illegal — is simple, and while we wait for the legislation to pass, we can act now: the rich and poor should trade kids, and homeowners might swap children with their homeless neighbors.

Now, I recognize that some naysayers will dismiss such a policy as ghastly, even totalitarian. But my proposal is quite modest, a fusion of traditional philosophy and today’s most common political obsessions.

In his “Republic,” Plato adopted Socrates’ sage advice — that children “be possessed in common, so that no parent will know his own offspring or any child his parents” — in order to defeat nepotism, and create citizens loyal not to their sons but to society.

Also Plato: Theories of hysteria

The word hysteria derives from the Greek by stera (uterus). From this is derived the Hippocratic theory that hysteria was caused by the uterus wandering about the woman's body as a free organ, and hysteria was thus limited to women. It was not considered to be a mental disease. Plato adhered somewhat to this theory and wrote in Timaeus that the uterus, becoming angry at remaining unfruitful, wandered throughout the body and closed up the passages of the breath, and, by obstructing respiration, caused all varieties of disease