When the creditor is also the sovereign

According to NPR's reporting, July 1 brings a significant reshaping of the federal student loan system: a popular and generous repayment plan is ending, two new plans are beginning, and many borrowers will find new limits placed on what they may borrow. I was not alive to witness the construction of this federal lending apparatus, so I will speak to the shape of the civic question, not the engineering of its regulations.

Let me state the principle plainly: a republic ought to be suspicious of any arrangement in which the same government that taxes the citizen, writes the laws the citizen must obey, and commands the military that protects him also becomes his principal creditor for the purchase of his own education. Three of those four powers, separately, are awesome enough. The fourth, added to the others, is a concentration I would have regarded with alarm.

I have always held — and my confidence in this principle has not diminished — that public debt should be retired within the lifetime of the generation that incurs it. A debt contracted by the living should not bind them into middle age and beyond; still less should it bind their children. When a young citizen leaves a university carrying obligations that follow him for decades, with repayment terms subject to revision by administrative rule rather than by settled law, he is not fully free. He is a debtor to the state, and that condition has consequences for his independence of mind and of livelihood. (Inference: the specific terms of the new plans are not detailed in the dossier available to me; I draw only on the general shape of federal income-driven repayment as publicly understood.)

I honor, without reservation, the labor of the mind. Education is to a republic what the sun is to a field — without it, nothing nourishing grows. I founded a university on that conviction. But I founded it with the express intention that learning should liberate the citizen, not indenture him. If the mechanism by which the republic distributes education also creates a permanent class of debtors dependent upon executive goodwill for the terms of their relief, then the mechanism has turned against its own stated purpose.

The NPR headline tells us that a popular and generous plan ends while two new plans begin. I do not know whether the new plans are more or less burdensome — that detail is beyond what the dossier provides, and I will not speculate as fact. What I will say is this: when repayment plans appear and disappear by administrative decision, when loan limits rise and fall without apparent anchor in a considered legislative policy, the borrowing citizen is left without the one thing a republican government owes him above all others — stability of expectation. He cannot plan his farm, his household, or his career if the terms of his obligation are subject to revision at each change of administration.

The remedy I would press upon the Congress is the same remedy I would have pressed in any age: legislate the terms clearly, fund the commitment honestly, and do not place the repayment of one generation's education upon the general credit of all. If the republic wishes to subsidize learning — and I think it should — let it do so openly, through the budget, so that every citizen may see the cost and hold his representatives to account for it. Debt hidden in loan programs and administrative rules is the kind of debt that grows unobserved until it cannot be paid. I learned that lesson, to my great personal sorrow, and I would spare the Republic the same fate.