Every company and every industry currently reaching out for subsidies, mandates and protective regulation should study the student loan industry’s predicament — being chased to the gallows by the Democratic majority — and ask whether political plunder is really the path to profit they want to follow.

The financial institutions who have pocketed subsidized profits in student loans for decades are now sounding the free-market siren, warning of a “government takeover.” But it’s hard to work up sympathy for an industry built on subsidy suckling.