How can any state “guarantee no-cost schooling for all children”? Well, they do, so it’s clearly possible. Why would early childhood be any different?
> everything comes at the cost of something we could have had instead
Of course. That’s the nature of spending money. Your talking points here don’t really amount to much beyond “better things aren’t possible”.
The way that the Gell-Man Amnesia effect is the term for instantly forgetting what you know about the gulf between popular narrative and expert familiarity, there should be a name for the phenomenon of newly re-discovering and re-litigating the social compact that undergirds basic services as if it was being proposed for the first time.