David McElroy

A city council in a small Arkansas town has decreed that no group is allowed to meet without council approval to discuss the city. Further, it bans the city’s mayor from meeting with people to discuss city business and it purports to disband a private citizens group.

After I picked my jaw up off the floor, I couldn’t decide whether the story was a better example of arrogance or stupidity. Either way, there’s ignorance all around. Watch the video for yourself.

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with First Amendment law knows that the move is unconstitutional, so I’m not going to dwell on the legal points. If it were just a legal matter, I’d laugh at the ignorance and stupidity of people making rules that they don’t have the authority to make.

But I see it as indicative of something much more sinister. I see it as the heart of what the coercive state is all about. At its core, the state is about the majority seizing power and deciding what everyone else is allowed to do — and that’s wrong, whether you’re telling people they can’t express their opinions or telling them what kind of toilets they must install or what kind of light bulbs they’re allowed to buy.

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At the beginning of the primary election season last year, a friend here in Alabama asked me what I thought of an obscure Republican gubernatorial candidate. The guy was a state legislator and physician who I’d never heard of before he announced he was running for governor.

“Robert Bentley?” I asked. “Who’s he? He has no real campaign experience. He’s never done anything that anybody’s heard of. He has less chance of getting elected governor than my dog Lucy does.”

Six months later, this obscure guy was elected governor in a landslide. Lucy still hasn’t announced her candidacy for anything.

I spent most of two decades working in Alabama politics among Republican campaigns. I was just as qualified as anybody to be considered an expert about who had a shot. But I was absolutely, positively, 100 percent wrong.

The iPhone is pretty darned ubiquitous these days — including the iPhone 4 that’s with me pretty much 24 hours a day — but many experts predicted its failure when it was announced early in 2007. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer certainly hoped Apple’s new phone would flop, but he sounded as though he was absolutely confident in April 2007 when he said the following:

“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent of them, than I would to have 2 percent or 3 percent, which is what Apple might get.”

So why do so-called experts get things so wrong so frequently. Was I less informed about state politics than I thought I was? Was I just an idiot who was falsely sure of his opinions? And what about Ballmer? He’s a very successful head of one of the world’s largest companies. How could he have been so wrong about the iPhone, as compared to his own failing Windows Mobile platform?

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One of the ironies of modern political life in America is that some people can’t get over the fact that a middle-class suburban black family has more in common with its white neighbors than with black families in a poor, uneducated inner city. So well-meaning but unthinking people keep trying to perpetuate political racial segregation instead of letting people decide what they want for themselves.

The latest example of this comes from the county next door to me. Shelby County in on the south side of Birmingham, and it contains much of the metro area’s wealthy and middle-class suburbs. There are pockets of lower-income people, but it’s typically home to a lot of middle class and upper middle class people.

It should be a sign of progress that quite a number of the families in the upper middle class neighborhoods of Shelby County are now black. They’re certainly still a small minority, but it’s common — and it’s not an issue for anyone. For an area that was seen as Ground Zero for racial discrimination less than 50 years ago, it’s huge progress. But some people are now unhappy that those black families — spread out through all those majority-white neighborhoods — don’t see black skin on any members of the County Commission.

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