Well given last Tuesday’s result, we should have expected this. The Mackinac Center website today posted an article written by the Center's legislative analyst Jack McHugh, which begins with:
“The fundamental problem facing our nation is that true representative government has been supplanted by an inbred, self-serving, self-perpetuating political class that does not represent the people. As a result, the government has escaped the control of the people.”
I’m thinking McHugh’s is a minority opinion, based on the reaction to the election results I’ve seen from around the country. But he doesn’t stop there. He tells us that this political class includes school employees: “The elected officials who grant [public sector retirement benefits] and their beneficiaries are all members of the same political/government class, which protects its own above all else.”
He sounds pretty upset, which I guess it'ss understandable given that election day closely followed the imploding of the economy and with it, the death of the Center’s central premise that free markets regulate themselves. Previously, the Center’s only response to the resulting bailout came from past president Larry Reed. He downplayed it as small potatoes: “Thank God we have the private sector to bail out the federal government not just last week, but every week!” This, he said, was because when companies pay taxes, they bail out the government.
Getting back to McHugh, he’s been busy. In addition to the above venting, he’s been taking time out to revise the Wikipedia Mackinac Center article. Rather than simply deleting the material detailing the Center's finances, he’s taken the novel approach of drowning the article in material from the Center’s website, driving the original text deep down. It’d take a pretty committed reader to get to anything revealing more than the Center’s usual PR.
In the past, several corporations, including Wal Mart, were taken to task by the media for revising their own Wikipedia entries. We'll have to see if word about this gets out.
But that’s the way Wikipedia works, everyone gets to edit. Including you. Have a look and make any change you think is warranted.
