Kentucky made child care free for child care workers

This is such a bad take.

Reproducing is such an important part of a society and humanity in general. Imagine everyone decided to be child free, what do you think would happen to the country you live in?

Countries with negative population growth often offer incentives for people to have kids because it can cause economic issues down the road and negative growth of the economy.

I would argue people without kids are freeloaders, all the "breeders" working full time jobs not only have to work but then go home and raise their kids to be productive members of the society.

The actual costs of raising a child are absolutely insane. Daycare cost alone is $20K a year for 4 years. That is enough to be a millionaire if you were to invest it in your early 20s. I'm not even going to talk how much time it takes out of your own life because its depressing.

I sympathize with the underlying thought, but I think that it is worth using this as a model of when we should use the tool of socialism and when we should use the tool of capitalism... what should be the balance?

In this case the fundamental problem seems to be that not enough people want to work in childcare, for the money that those businesses are currently offering. Part of that problem is for some of the potential workers the barrier is that paying for childcare for their own children would cost enough to make working in the industry not worth the money for them.

So the two solutions proposed here are: make childcare free for those who provide childcare, and making childcare free for everyone. Both of these solutions solve the problem for potential workers whose main problem is the affordability of their own childcare.

Notably the "free for everyone" does not actually improve solving the one problem we are talking about: it does not unblock anyone else to enable more workers in this one industry. But conversely it would unblock those people from working in other industries, ones that already seem to pay more. So it would probably wind up with less people working in childcare than the more focused "childcare free for childcare workers".

The counter-point to this of course is that we are creating a huge market distortion, essentially "forcing" people into childcare work (not really, but...).

The pure capitalistic solution would be to leave it like it is: let the market decide how much childcare is worth, and that will sort itself out. The problem with this approach is that it winds up producing a less-than-optimal solution: people who would be more productive for society wind up at home doing individual child care, and there are vastly different outcomes for children of well-off families than those of the poor (so societal imbalance based on the birth lottery).

To me the only right solution is for some sort of wage stipend from the government (from tax monies) that goes directly to childcare workers. This would absolutely be the government putting its thumb on the scale to increase the supply of childcare workers, but form the government's perspective it is probably a good investment both to get more workers available in all categories, and to improve outcomes for the children of low-wage families (good both in a floats-all-boats perspective, and a social justice one).

The problem is, of course, that it is absolutely a socialist means of improving things, and those who have made capitalism a religion are going to go nuts about that.

> some people who would rather take care of their own children are pushed to take a job and have someone else watch their child

You could say the same about the taxes used to pay for public schools.

> fail to see why that's superior to a universal childcare subsidy

For one, it doesn't free up labor. Two, most systems I'm aware of let one take a childcare subsidy and use it at home. Paying providers by default makes administration easier by reducing the number of payees. (There is also an oversight cost with private payments.)

I’ve come to the belief that virtually all of the culture war is a battle over fertility and parenting.

One of the hardest things about being human is that human children are ludicrously high maintenance. We have some of the highest maintenance offspring in nature. High parental investment requirements may be a factor in our evolution of complex social systems and longevity (“the grandmother effect”) but it also creates massive pressure and strife in the areas of gender and social dynamics.

I feel like non parents don’t get this. I have kids and listen when I say that nothing can prepare you for how high maintenance human children are. There are no words. Even the process of pregnancy and delivery are a life threatening medical condition that used to kill a large number of women. Our species really is uniquely burdened this way.

Many cultures have what amounts to a system of soft socially enforced slavery in which 50% of the population, namely women, are pressured or compelled to dedicate their lives to reproduction and raising children. Cultures that don’t do this either face declining birth rates or have to subsidize it financially instead because someone has to do it. Humans do not emerge from eggs and raise themselves.

I think this means if we want gender equality and don’t also want demographic collapse we must subsidize high quality child care.

Similar to managed welfare vs UBI.

One is creating defined resources and using bureaucracy to divvy them out and force people into buckets they might not be happy with. e.g. here's your government cheese.

The other empowers individuals to make their own decisions with cash and lets the free market figure out how best to mine those dollars from the individuals receiving them.

I suspect which option a person thinks is right largely depends on how they view humanity. Either you want to trust people to make their own decisions as adults, suffering the consequences of their decisions, or you want to extend childhood deep into "adulthood" making sure they can't make the wrong choice, because the nanny state makes the choice for them.

I supposed in the case of managed welfare, only those who manage become independently wealthy get the privilege of making their own decisions.