Every time you look at us with disappointment for our decision to stay at home with our children, that’s what you’re doing. People also do it with women who choose to provide for their children in other ways. Neither is a good look. But it’s particularly disappointing to see some of those bad traits in a speech from the President.

Charlie Spiering reports on a speech President Obama made in Rhode Island today. You know things are rough for President Obama this election season when he is relegated to a state so small CNN thinks it’s a city.

Anyway, he was painting a picture of how he’d like to expand the administrative state to include government pre-school. Because public schools are doing such a good job generally. Anyway, he then took an absolutely bizarre swipe against stay-at-home mothers:

“Sometimes, someone, usually Mom, leaves the workplace to stay home with the kids, which then leaves her earning a lower wage for the rest of her life as a result,” he said. “That’s not a choice we want Americans to make.”

Here are three problems with his argument.

1) It Exists In A Fantasy Realm

Putting the absolute best construction on this statement, we might say President Obama misspoke. Perhaps he meant to say he doesn’t want mothers to have to choose between staying home and lower future wages. I mean, he didn’t say “I don’t want mothers forced to make this decision,” but we could imagine he might have wished he’d said it.

But perhaps it’s because this stay-at-home mother studied economics before she stayed home with her kids, in reality this is like saying “I want a world where unicorns are real and not just Taylor Swift Halloween costumes.” You can say you wish that taking time out of the workforce would have no effect on income, but that’s not how economics works. If every person got paid the same over the course of his or her lifetime — whether or not he or she took time away from the workforce to raise children — that would be an imaginary place, not a real place where scarce goods are allocated through market prices. I mean, you can believe in your heart of hearts that command economies can magically milk efficiencies out of something other than people acting in their self-interest, but you probably can’t do it with a grasp of reality. People should be free to make their own decisions regarding what they consume and what they produce, unless we want to be controlled by an all-powerful state. And what that means is that we have trade-offs.

When I had my first child, I traded the money of my newspaper job for the far-greater value (for me) of time spent with my totally awesome daughter. It would not make sense for me to be paid for newspaper work I didn’t produce. And had I wanted the income more than the time with my child, I could have made that decision as well. People are free, you see, to make the decision that works best.

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