Victims Of The "Administrative State": Punished For A Crime It Would Have Taken A Time Machine To Commit
Government employees sometimes go after the wrong people -- those who are not poor, without connections, and unable to defend themselves -- and this is one of those cases.

This guy, John W. Childs, initially agreed to a settlement -- though it is clear (see the time machine aspect) that he and his firm are not guilty. Then the government dudes thought they'd take things a little further, grind his face into the dirt, and he said no way.

Holman Jenkins writes in a non-locked piece at the WSJ:

Usually in the run-up to a presidential election, or soon thereafter, a column appears in this space pointing out that an important part of every president's job is protecting America from Washington. Barack Obama did not embrace this presidential duty. Maybe Donald Trump will.

John W. Childs runs a highly reputed Boston private-equity firm that Dodd-Frank placed under the jurisdiction of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which demanded a list of campaign donations.

Lo, in 2013, one partner gave $250 to a Boston mayoral candidate who didn't get past the Democratic primary. Ten years earlier, the city of Boston had invested in the firm's fund.

"I'm not in favor of bribery," says Mr. Childs, though he wonders how a donation today can influence an investment decision made by somebody else a decade earlier.

Never mind. He agreed to a settlement and a fine of $35,000 under "pay to play" rules, but then the SEC demanded he also accept "censure" of his firm. "Censure," to him, sounded like "evildoing capitalists" admitting to "something egregiously wrong," so the normally publicity-shy Mr. Childs drew a line.

In a wholly uneconomic decision, his firm has decided to fight. "I'm fortunate that I can afford to do this," he says. Stay tuned, because his battle potentially has First Amendment implications.

I recently talked at length to someone who was victimized by the FTC. I'm going to try to find a reporter who will take on his story.

The thing that became clear to me -- about his case and an FTC attack on other friends of ours -- is that protecting the public is often not the goal in the slightest. That's just cover for the careerist attacks that public officials foist on people who aren't guilty -- freezing their money and doing all sorts of other ugly things to see that they are incapable of defending themselves.

I hope Mr. Childs prevails here. In defending his own rights, he'll be defending all of ours.