Citizens are not only ultimately, but should be practically, in charge of their government. And for this they need information.

This is not a partisan issue. I have many partisan and anti-partisan ideas, sure. But this is not one of them, is it? I mean, left, right, center, shouldn’t every American want to know what their governments, say, spend their money on?

“But, but, but!” I hear some sputter.

When Brett Narloch of the North Dakota Policy Council came out with a proposal to require government schools to put their budgets on public-access Web pages, he got some strange criticism. The blogger for the state’s Democratic Party attacked, but didn’t address one single issue of Narloch’s proposal. Instead, he sniped at Narloch’s past political activities, noting Narloch liked CAFTA, and prefers private accounts in Social Security to the current uninvested pension system.

And then the blogger asks, “I wonder if there’s a hidden agenda in his new scheme?”

Maybe. Maybe not. It’s irrelevant, really. For why would anyone want a government-supported institution to keep its books away from voters? To demand no hiding doesn’t reveal a hidden agenda. But to oppose this unhiding reveals a preference for, well, hidden agendas galore . . . that is, hidden spending.

Amusingly, elsewhere on the Democratic blog the Bush administration comes under criticism . . . for lack of transparency.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.