COLUMN -- Met Council decision inspires imagination

Pioneer Press
Aug. 12, 2004

Excerpt --

In the eyes of progressives, the question is no longer how we maintain a functioning region of diverse communities. The question now is what is the most effective way to homogenize the metro region into a single "community"? The freedom to choose an individual lifestyle must be sacrificed to achieve the greater vision of "smart growth." People are the means, not the end of that process.

And the truly sad part is that good people who support the Met Council on this issue — people who would recoil in horror at the notion of a Soviet-like central planning bureaucracy — nonetheless believe that coercion for the common good is somehow a middle ground between totalitarianism and freedom. These people fail to understand that government planning and individual freedom can be combined only when government plans how best to preserve freedom, not how most effectively to coerce a noble result.

Read the column . . . .