Squirrel-Hair's child-care policy: using the state's coercive power for social engineering

Logan Albright at Conservative Review gets to the essence of what is objectionable about it:

There is always a cost to accepting government benefits, even when those benefits allow you to keep more of your own money for specific, government-designated purposes.

For evidence of this, we need look no further than federal education policy. Through Race to the Top Grants and No Child Left Behind waivers, the Department of Education induced states to accept the wildly unpopular Common Core standards. Since states accepted federal money, they had to abide by certain conditions — to the detriment of children everywhere.

A similar thing is likely to happen with child care. Credits, subsidies, and private accounts for child care all require the government to define what constitutes child care. This means that some products and services will be deemed “appropriate” and given special tax treatment, while others will be deemed “inappropriate” and taxed normally. It’s easy to imagine a scenario in which the government is deciding what sort of food you should feed your kids, what sort of books you should read them, and to what sort of day care you should send them. Adopt the government’s preferred choice, and be rewarded with a tasty tax treat. Make a different choice, and pay through the nose.
This is all part of the continuing usurpation of parental rights and responsibilities of parents by government agents. It is bad enough that the state has assumed more or less complete control of the education system; it now proposes to insert itself into the very business of child rearing.

This is raw Big Brother-ism.  This is it-takes-a-village-ism.

Calling it a political home run  is to declare that the statist horse is out of the barn and is not coming back.