In your June 24 article "May Newburger is Angry," Carol Frank quotes the supervisor as saying, "We are the only industrialized country in the world that does not have affordable, accessible and excellent childcare for everyone." What nonsense, where are all of these utopian countries? We all want and favor excellent childcare. The question is: How do we achieve it?

May Newburger makes it sound like all that is needed to achieve affordable, accessible and excellent childcare is for a government official to enunciate the idea. What goes unsaid in her statement is that it would be extremely costly to achieve her goal. In addition, it would take a vast and unfair redistribution of the nation's wealth. We should at least ask if this is what the American people really want?

It would mean that women who care for their children at home, plus all of those without young children, would be forced by government to finance those who decide to let others take care of their children. Why is it fair for society to subsidize working women versus those women who work at home?

Professor Jean Bethke Elshtain who teaches at the University of Chicago has this to say: "Surely, there is something profoundly distorted about a culture prepared to send nursing mothers of six-week-old infants into a war zone (as happened during the Gulf War); a culture that doesn't support parental leave in any generous way; a culture that cuts children and parents adrift from the moment of birth. Surely there is something profoundly distorted within a culture that makes men and women who want to stay home with their infants feel guilty and holds, especially in the case of women, that they are somehow not living out some feminist ideal."

Regarding public policy, socialism always sounds better than freedom and individual responsibility. The perfect case history for this truism is the Soviet Union which no longer exists.

Robert Previdi