>The objective of providing free childcare to anyone that wants it is to enable people to avail themselves of free childcare.

The objective of excluding the parent from that has been made pretty clear at this point, which is a deliberate choice to destroy the family unit.

>Value is also determined by the fact that stay-at-home mums are willing to look after their own kids for free, and childcare professionals are not.

The free market value of taking care of 1 child under some arbitrary standard of care is not meaningfully impacted by the fact an arbitrary person might do it for free, anymore than the fact I might be willing to search for gold for free reduces the value of gold. It will have some effect in aggregate, but that effect would impact the whole market so is meaningless in the context of differentiating a universal payment.

>Makes it easier for parents to decide to work if they want to, but I thought ancaps liked that sort of thing...

It indeed does make it easier to decide to work if you're now getting taxed to cover $12K per child of every child in the whole state going to daycare, and you get none of that for your own kid unless you put them into daycare yourself because magically your own childcare doesn't count.

>The absolute best thing we could do for children is to ensure that those of them who have low-earning parents stay at home on their own with no daycare and no education?

I said from the beginning I wanted a waiver. i.e. reduction of taxes. I would put taxes at 0% and free up lots of jobs and returned tax money to low-earning families so they could afford more for their children, which I think is the best thing possible for them. With the added effect they can spend that money freely rather than having a state lord over them what one public school they can spend it on or lording over them with their own stolen money what childcare provider they can use.

The reason why I would argue for equal subsidies if they're provided is I believe either no tax, or equal subsidies is the most liberty minded solution. The solution where the state forcibly taxes and then lords the money over you depending on whom provides the childcare is the lowest-liberty solution of all of them. That is why I'm a temporary ally of the policy alternative I reference.

Got it, family units are destroyed by kids spending some time at nurseries. Free market values aren't determined by what the free market actually pays for services (absolutely nothing for parenting your own kid, potentially a lot more for looking after someone else's) but by weird analogies to gold (children of course also being a commodity). Parents are of course, famously transactional in their relationships with children, with the key priority being maximising how much the government spends on their care. If daycare is subsidised absolutely everyone will claim the maximum amount (just like the alternative you propose!) because otherwise all the burden of paying for it will fall upon stay-at-home mums (I dunno, maybe the income tax on their massive parenting salaries?) and not spread across the wider taxpaying base, the highest paying segments of which generally aren't parents of infants. Putting up taxes is bad, but putting up everyone's taxes much more to subsidise -checks notes- people who enjoy looking after children so much they'd prefer it to free daycare is better. But the best possible thing for low-earning families is for them to have to lose all benefits and pay for care, schooling, medical bills etc, because if there's anyone that pays more into the system than they get out of it, it's low income families...

Not gonna lie, if it requires this much compounded nonsense to construct an argument against childcare vouchers, the case for it is much better than I thought :)