Kids Can't Learn Unless They Have Free Food

I followed this link from Drudge. Although the article itself is boring--just another government program--I thought Mayor Bloomberg's quote was telling. He says, "The kids who come to school without a decent meal in his or her stomach, they don't learn anything. People say, ‘Why give the kids breakfast?’ Well, if you want to educate the kids, which is in everybody's interest, they have to have a meal too.” This shows an interesting yet illogical pattern of justification for any social scheme: start with something everyone tends agree is desirable (educated youth) and then claim that this scheme will fail without the addition of another scheme (free breakfast). But, this is merely begging the question. I would argue that public education of our youth is a negative rather than positive externality. In other words, public schools tend to produce idiots. But hey, why not have all meals provided by the schools? After all, how can a student finish homework in the evening on an empty stomach? Is it a cluster of institutionalized mental blunders like these that explains the "expansion of the State" libertarians yelp about?