Looked at another, it corrupts the whole economy. (Does it really help workers to idealize a system wherein productivity means almost nothing?)

But it doesn't corrupt legislators. Much. It gives legislators precious little to dole out to supporters. Unlike under the spoils system, it's harder for representatives to buy off constituents (other than by a general increase in government and catering to public employee unions, of course). What to do?

Pork to the rescue! Porkbarrel spending on constituent and private projects is an amazingly efficient way to dole out favors with other people's money. It's the spoils system reborn.

And as Mr. Edwards pointed out in another of his Cato reports, this sort of government favoring of private individuals is not limited to the federal government. Public debt for private projects amounts to 23 percent of today's total municipal debt. The old joke used to be "thank God we don't get all the government we pay for." Now taxpayers pay for so much that isn't government, we can repeat the old line only with an added bitterness.

There's something inherent in unlimited representative government, and that something is the spreading, thickly, of money to favored supporters. When the spoils system was replaced with a civil service, a new form of spoils grew to take its place.

Wouldn't it be nice if our representatives realized that it wasn't their job to spread money around without limit? If they could give up on the New Spoils System, on the one hand, and exercise some fiduciary responsibility regarding our paid employees, on the other, fiscal policy wouldn't be such a mess.

I won't be holding my breath.

And I won't be holding my breath for the people who complain about "overpaid corporate execs" to turn their ire against the thousands upon thousands of overpaid federal employees. The charge of "greed" will never affix to civil servants and their union representatives.

But greed is a cheap shot charge here as elsewhere. Everybody wants more money, and everybody has a right to ask for more. And employers have just as much right to offer only so much.

Perhaps it's just that, when negotiating with workers and unions, our representatives don't have much spine simply because the money "isn't theirs," and thus they have scant incentive to use it wisely.

The trouble with this explanation is not that it doesn't explain. It explains the situation too well: what room is left for reform? It suggests that politics and bureaucracies are themselves congenitally incapable of rational management.

Sure government workers are overpaid. But that only points to the bigger problem: the federal government has escaped popular control, and is increasingly run not for the benefit of the people, but for the benefit of the people in government.