Leaving St. Paul as an ex-Republican

Here's a link to Steve Greenhut's column written after spending a week with the official Republicans in St. Paul. He's been moving in that directions for some time, but it loo0ks as if he's leaving the Republicans behind, at least unless they reform themselves in the kinds of directions a Ron Paul might take them. It's been interesting to watch Steve's evolution. He's been a pretty strong libertarian since he came to the Register but believed that the best way to express his beliefs politically was within the Republican Party. Now the party has drifted so far in a statist direction -- accelerated when it had control of both the legislative and executive branches -- and become so fixated on cultural issues that are simply none of the government's business, that he's had enough.

R.C. Hoiles's principles

Since R.C. Hoiles, founder of Freedom Newspapers, which grew into Freedom Communications, which still owns the Register, was born in November, we like to do a little bit of celebrating and explaining his legacy each November. Here's a piece he wrote sometime in the 1960s, apparently in response to requests from other publishers in the chain for an explanmation of what the company stood for.

Bottom line? No individual or group has the right to use force or coerceion on any other individual or group. Everything else flows from that basic axiom.