Calling it “not socialism” because the program is thirty years old is a word game. Socialism is not defined by the age of the statute. It is defined by who decides how other people’s money is used. Once the federal government has extracted the money, politicians and bureaucrats get to declare which uses are “good” and which are “bad.” That is the same power whether they are funding day-care centers, stay-at-home stipends, or anything else. The fact that they now prefer one set of recipients over another does not change the principle. It just means a different coalition won the last election. School choice is a limited exception because it moves the decision closer to the parent and introduces some competition among schools. Even then, the cleaner solution is to get the federal government out of education entirely. Redirecting an existing pot of money is still politicians picking winners. It does not restore the money to the people who earned it, and it does not remove the precedent that Washington may rearrange family life according to the preferences of whoever holds office. If a program was illegitimate when it was created, it does not become legitimate because we now like the new beneficiaries better. The honest position is to reduce the extraction and let families keep more of what they produce. Everything else is an argument over how the plunder should be divided.