> I used the price as an example to indicate how heavily subsidized it must be.

The amount of the subsidy is an independent question. Regardless of the amount you choose, it can then be in kind or in cash.

> Because the market for daycare will favor the well-off. You're just topping off the income of people who need daycare, then leaving everyone to fend for themselves.

If you give someone with less money the amount of money it takes to pay for a quality daycare, they obviously now have the money to pay for it -- you've just given it to them.

At which point there are two possibilities, right? One is, they use it for that, in which case your objection doesn't apply. It's the same thing as happens if daycare was provided in kind.

The other is, they use a less expensive daycare because they need something else more than they need the more expensive daycare, e.g. they would use the extra money to buy food. Then what you're really doing is forcing them to use the more expensive daycare when given the choice they'd have used the money for something they regard as more important. That's not actually helping them when they're right, but assuming they're wrong is assuming that you know their circumstances better than they do.

> And now you've taken a person out of the labor force. Possibly forever.

Only under the assumption that being a homemaker isn't work.

> None of this makes much sense in most cases. In my municipality, kindergarten employees are responsible for roughly 5 small children or 8 big children at any given time. There are no full-time jobs in this country that pay a fifth of a kindergarten employee's salary (yes yes, there are overheads etc).

Daycare as a business/government has costs that daycare as a family member doesn't. The former needs a separate piece of real estate to operate out of, insurance against claims by the family, the full complement of support staff for accounting/legal/HR/etc. The latter uses their own home which is a sunk cost and doesn't require the rest of it because they're not an organization.