(FORTUNE Magazine) – Every once in a while something entirely logical happens in our nation's capital, and these moments should not be allowed to pass unheralded because in the last analysis what is Keeping Up for if not to cheer when they cut pay in the federal government or at least try to wrestle it down? Logical happening: The Office of Personnel Management (OPM), having fallen under the sway of Reaganite Republicans, is saying (a) that federal workers are overpaid, (b) that the criteria for paying them are wrong, and (c) that the correct criteria ^ would include a heavy emphasis on the quit rate among federal employees--an extra-low rate meaning we can assume they don't need a raise. All of this conforms to economic theory, which is possibly why it was received so indignantly by folks who write in to the Washington Post, typical of whom was ''Pennsylvanian in D.C.,'' who opined that most bureaucrats are concerned only ''to offer their diverse skills to their country'' and do not care whether they get more or less than their counterparts in private industry. The link between the quit rate and pay rates is fairly evident. People quit their jobs when they think they can do better elsewhere. In the Great Depression hardly anybody had such expectations, and the quit rate in manufacturing was only 1.2% a month. (It rose almost fourfold during the booming Forties.) But the quit rate in the federal government today is even lower than that: OPM puts it at only 3.8% a year. By contrast, people in the private sector quit quite frequently, sometimes even when the boss doesn't want them to. The quit rate for the private sector as a whole today runs close to 20% a year. Ever since 1962 the legal theory about federal employees was that they'd be paid precisely as much as comparable workers in the private sector. In practice nobody ever tried to establish true comparability. The Labor Department surveys of private sector markets looked only at large corporations, thus ruling out about 70% of the labor force. Furthermore, the annual comparability studies made no attempt to adjust for the much greater job security, pension benefits, and goofing-off opportunities in government work. To be sure, you can argue forever about what's comparable to what. But it's hard to argue that people who cannot be beaten off with baseball bats need more compensation to make them stay around.