The big lie about public workers.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Political Eye - Free Enterprise Nation's James E. MacDougald on the financial burden posed by government workers

"Government workers are the new privileged class," James E. MacDougald, the founder of Free Enterprise Nation, told The Washington Post recently. MacDougald, a retired CEO, heads Free Enterprise Nation, a "research and activist group," according to the Post, which he founded "to call attention to the financial burden posed by government workers."

Actually, Free Enterprise Nation, headquartered in Tampa, Florida, is an "activist" group in the same sense that the Washington office of Dick Armey's FreedomWorks runs "activist" campaigns.

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Free Enterprise Nation has spent $30,000 so far this year and $60,000 in 2010 lobbying for changes in public employee pension rules, a ban on federal support for states and municipalities that are struggling to meet their pension obligations, and the expansion of domestic fossil fuel production and nuclear power, among other issues, according to records available at opensecrets.org, the website of the Center for Responsive Politics.

MacDougald put $1 million of his own money into the group, according to TampaBay.com. He made that money in the private insurance and pension industry, a fact he touts in the Amazon author bio for his 2010 book, Unsustainable.. How Big Government, Taxes, and Debt Are Wrecking America.

Applied Benefits Research, the company MacDougald built with his wife and registered in Florida, made him rich selling insurance and financial products. He "lived the American Dream," according to his Amazon author bio.

Now he is spending his retirement spreading the free market gospel, arguing that teachers, cops, and firefighters ought to face the same lean, mean stripped-down health care and pensions as nonunion workers in the private sector.

MacDougald is like the anti-Wendell Potter, the insurance industry whistle-blower who has testified and spoken widely about how his former industry makes massive profits by denying claims and withholding needed services. MacDougald, having made millions in the same industry, is now the chief lobbyist and spokesman for the idea that all middle class workers should get such lousy benefits.

It seems transparently ridiculous to call this a grassroots, citizens' uprising against the "privileged class."

But the anti-public-employee message Free Enterprise Nation and other rightwing groups are putting out has real traction.

Echoing through the talk-radio ditto-chamber, and recycled by Republican politicians from Scott Walker in Wisconsin to...