Middleboro Review and so on

  Sponsored by The Boston Foundation The Best of CommonWealth Beacon OPINION House chambers. (SHNS) Why the Beacon Hill transparency debate gets it all wrong September 20, 2026 By Avi Green For the past few years, one of the central debates in Massachusetts politics has been the fight over transparency. From the Democratic state auditor to the progressive advocacy group Act on Mass to GOP gubernatorial nominee Mike Minogue, critics argue that if we just knew more about what happens inside the State House, we would get better policies. Unfortunately, this diagnosis is flawed, so its prescriptions are the wrong medicine for what ails our body politic. Fundamentally, the problem is not that the public lacks crucial information about its government; it’s that its government lacks crucial information about the public -- and has little motivation to care about that. Members of the Legislature don’t actually know what their constituents want – at least, not on a systematic basis – and wo...