Hawpe's reflections may explain his perspectives

From David Hawpe in the C-J...

A tough start:

I'm nothing if not consistent.

Yes and no. I wish he had been more consistent in his concern about the impact of government on the working poor. But his consistency with respect to statism prevented that from occurring.

Then, some cool stories of his early activism:

My first appearance in The Courier-Journal, 57 years ago this month, resulted from an act of political dissent. Actually, I made both pages A1 and B1 that day [holding a sign], at the age of 9.

I learned two things as a result of this early involvement in participatory democracy. The first is that newspapers are powerful....The other thing I learned is the Law of Unintended Consequences. Those trucks began muddying up the next street over.

The second lesson didn't take as well.

Then, some nostalgia before going into his "two internships in the building" with the AP in 1964 and The Louisville Times in 1965.

The big event of my AP stint was an interview with our biggest local celebrity, who earlier in the year had changed his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali....

The big stories during my summer on the Times were the DuPont explosions (they sent all of us expendable interns to the still-smoking scene) and the prospective opening of Iroquois High....

We've prompted a lot of change in my 40 years at these newspapers. For example, our coverage of early strip mining helped prepare the way for federal regulation of the awful practices that sent boulders careening down the slopes toward nearby houses and mud slides oozing onto garden plots. We're still at it today, revealing the ugly truth about mountaintop removal's environmental consequences....

I would guess that he has been (reasonably) influenced by this horrible setting-- in which a firm pollutes (something the govt should regulate, in the absence of property rights) and operates within a powerful, monopsonistic setting (probably with some govt corruption helping out to boot). From there, whatever natural bent toward statism has probably been accentuated by this example of corporatism and monopoly power (and govt ineffectiveness) run amok.