More than 10,000 federal employees benefit from a lovely little program whereby the taxpayers cover some of their student-loan costs, as we learn in this USA Today piece.

A spokesman for Harry Reid says that it’s necessary in order to get top-quality people into government “service.” I would much rather have those “top-quality” people working in productive jobs and paying their own way. This is just another aspect of the legal plunder (as Bastiat put it) that has spread all over the U.S.