On Thu, 19 Jan 1995, Cotter_Cindy wrote: > In defense of the mysterious HG, who was willing to have the > government pay for child care but not provide it, hasn't the > superiority of government child care as described here in > many posts rested primarily on the fact that the government > can afford to pay more? Is there some reason to believe > private child care would not improve if it were funded by > the government at the same rates as the wonderful university > centers we're hearing about? Aren't matters of financing > being confounded with management issues? > The question was whether publically provided care _could_ be adequate, or good. Possibly privately provided care could be if properly funded--elite private centers show that it can. But the university childcare examples show that the the mere fact of public provision need not undermine and may enhance provision. I don't suppose anyone but committed pro-planning socialists--I know a few who aren't mad--object to the idea of privately provided childcare. The problem, though, is that in the present context, private childcare means a two tier system: good and relatively expensive care, provided under moderately exploitative (for the providers) conditions for those who can afford it, and mediocre or worse McKids care provided under highly exploitative conditions for those who can't. That's not an argument aginst private care. It is an argument for a two-pronged strategy of increasing public funding, say by direct grants to parents, for use in either public or private centers, and increasing the amount and scope of public provision. And in the current Newtonian mood in which budgets for everything are being slashed, good luck! I'd feel marginally better about the prospects for popular resistance to Newtonianism as people realize that these cuts impose intolerable misery on wade swathes of the population, not just the mythical welfare queens in their Cadillacs, if the Democrats were not playing catch-up, caving in to pressure on the right whenever it is applied. Anyone who cannot see that the Democrats are hopeless and that we must now build a new party, one that doesn't fuse or truck with these GOP clones, is in the grip of either illusion or despair, and in any event ideology. --Justin Schwartz
