What socialists get wrong about "free" daycare

The more the government intervenes in the market, the more New York parents pay for child care.

reason.com

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Mamdani ran on the most ambitious universal child care proposal in the country: free day care for all kids ages 6 weeks and above. Apparently, this pitch was compelling to the city's beleaguered parents: The self-styled socialist won by a hefty margin.

There is a fundamental tension at play in all efforts to make child care cheaper. It is profoundly labor-intensive, requiring great human resources to be expended. The most engaged, most highly qualified people won't be attracted to these jobs. You can sometimes get highly motivated, highly educated, super-qualified workers to perform the labor of child care—if it's for their own kids. That those families are penalized in today's New York, forced to fund the universal child care system with their tax dollars while not availing themselves of it, is wrong and unfair. It's made even more insulting by the fact that the universal pre-K system essentially functions as a giant network of handouts to the already-wealthy, with very little success in actually improving the offerings for poor kids.

Every family should be free to choose the child care arrangement that works for them, but no family should be required to pay for the child care choices of others.