Arrogance and stupidity go hand in hand for the coercive state

By David McElroy · July 20, 2011

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.

When you support a system that asserts the right to tell you what to do with your money or what you’re allowed to put into your body — and asserts the right to use violence to enforce those decrees — your’e supporting the same kind of thinking that leads to this decision in Gould, Ark. Those who support “limited government” like to point to the U.S. Constitution’s alleged guarantees of our freedoms, but if you’re paying attention, you see that those freedoms have been stripped away one by one for the last hundred years or so.

This attempt by arrogant and stupid people in a little town in Arkansas is a microcosm of the coercive state using naked power to enforce what some people want. In this case, the rest of the people running the modern American state system aren’t ready to go this far in banning speech. Not yet. They don’t mind banning you from speaking in elections in certain ways, but they’re not ready to go this far. It’s just a matter of when, though.

Supporting a coercive state is sort of like cheating. Once you’ve cheated a little bit, cheating a little bit more doesn’t seem so bad. You even justify it. Before you know it, you have no integrity left. If you support a “limited” coercive state, you’re ultimately supporting something that will lead to the same place where this city council has gone. It’s just that when it finally goes that far, it will be made to sound nice and legal when nine justices in black robes — or at least five of them — make up some justification for allowing it.

Coercion is coercion, whether you’re doing a little bit or a lot. The arrogant people on this city council are just a lot more honest about their naked desire to control people than most politicians are.

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Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

The Republican Party is dead. It still exists in name, of course, but it’s nothing but a shell. All that’s left are idiots and stooges and con men of the MAGA party. When Donald Trump is gone — which won’t be long — those populist idiots and pragmatic fools will have no one to follow. Democrats will thrive. They will take more power than ever and they will push the federal government further to the radical far left than ever. When that happens, don’t just blame Trump if you’re a conservative. Blame every person who has claimed to be a conservative and has given up on principles, character and everything else that Republicans once claimed to stand for. As someone who worked as a GOP political consultant for many years, this is disgusting and disturbing to me. Those who have enabled Trump to have almost unchecked power are going to be shocked when they see what they will unleash in the long run. It’s been plain all along what this narcissistic con man is. It’s your fault that you chose to pretend not to see what he really is.

We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

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