When Hillary Clinton went on the Howard Stern Show, the former secretary of state compared Bernie Sanders’s support for tuition-free public higher education to a kid running for class president on a platform of “chocolate milk for everybody.”

More sophisticated objections to Free College for All come in at least three different flavors. The broadly libertarian objection is that the government shouldn’t be in the business of guaranteeing individuals positive outcomes like a college education in the first place. Critics of this type believe in “negative” rights (i.e., rights to not have others aggress against us), but oppose “positive” rights such as the right to health care or tuition-free public higher education. Then there’s the pseudo-populist objection, made by Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Pete Buttigieg in 2019, that Free College for All is a gift to the children of the rich. (Plutocrats, after all, are part of the “all.”) Finally, there’s the technocratic liberal objection that Sanders’s sweeping proposal to abolish tuition at all public colleges and universities (and trade schools) is well intentioned but poorly designed.

Noah Smith pushes this last objection in a recent Bloomberg Opinion column. Smith is friendly enough to positive rights, and he correctly criticizes Clinton and Buttigieg. Far from being a giveaway to the rich, under “most plans” for financing tuition-free public college through taxation, “the wealthy and upper-middle class would end up paying most of the bill.”