David McElroy

It was almost 1 a.m. by the time I came out of Walmart Wednesday night. I didn’t have many items, but I rolled my purchases out to the car on a shopping cart because I had a huge bag of dog food that I didn’t want to carry. It had been raining hard while I was in the store, but there was a break in the rain while I walked out and loaded the car. Then the rain started again.

The parking lot was virtually deserted and there were shopping carts left abandoned in various places, presumably by people who didn’t want to take the time in the rain to put the carts in the places where they belonged. But I found myself walking the empty cart over to the cart corral — or whatever they call it these days — as the rain came pounding down on me.

As I ran back to the car, I laughed at myself for going to the trouble of putting the cart in the right place in the downpour. I briefly wondered why I bothered. After all, there were plenty of other carts all over the parking lot. Mine would have been just one more. There was nobody out there to see me, so nobody would have even known I hadn’t put it where it was supposed to go. Despite those things, I immediately knew why I’d done it.

I’d returned the cart to the proper place simply because I had decided — at some distant time in the past that I don’t even recall — that I was the kind of person who always put the cart up. I’d seen — and disapproved of — many people over the years who left carts in random places in parking lots. So I’d unconsciously programmed myself. I had decided that I wasn’t like that — and that programming gently led me to walk with a cart in the rain when others wouldn’t.

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“These defendants are guilty,” federal prosecutor Kendall Day told jurors in Montgomery, Ala., Wednesday morning. “It’s time for you to tell these defendants that the government in Alabama is not for sale.”

Federal prosecutors have been on a righteous crusade in Alabama for the last year or so. They arrested about a dozen people who were either politicians or involved in the gambling industry in the state and charged them with bribery. It was all about good government and keeping crooks out of the public’s business, they said. Unfortunately, the story is a lot more complicated than prosecutors want us to believe.

What’s the difference between a campaign contribution and a bribe? What’s the difference between giving someone money to get elected in exchange for supporting a certain position — which is illegal — and delivering a block of votes to a candidate in exchange for supporting a certain position — which is legal? If a union leader says, “If you support this law that we want, my 10,000 members will vote for you,” why is that legal — if it’s illegal to say, “If you support this law that we want, I will give your campaign a million dollars to help you get elected”?

The guy in the picture above is Milton McGregor. He’s been the leading figure in the gambling industry in Alabama for decades. He’s owned greyhound racing tracks and huge bingo operations. Because most gambling is illegal in Alabama — for reasons that have never been clear to me — he has had to fight hard for the right to be left alone by the government to run his businesses.

I don’t mean to paint him as a saint or a do-gooder. He’s not. He’s a hard-nosed businessman who’s willing to cut corners and bend the rules to get what he wants. He’s been known to make illegal cash contributions to candidates, but that’s never been legally proven. Two years ago, the state government was trying hard to shut down his bingo operations. The governor at the time was making it a big deal. He had a task force that he was using to raid many of the operations and claim they were illegal. (For complicated reasons that I won’t bore you with, the bingo operations were operating in a gray area of the law. The governor was interpreting the law one way. The operators interpreted it another way.)

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More random thoughts that don’t belong anywhere else…

I’ve noticed something interesting about the psychology of most people who consider themselves libertarians. It’s my observation that most libertarians are opposed to rules coming from the state, but they’re also temperamentally inclined to have strong views about “the right way to do things” on a wide range of subjects. I don’t generally see them wanting to force others to comply with their ways, but it seems as though they’re more drawn to systematic rules than the average person is.

Two questions: 1) Am I accurate in my observation? 2) If so, why might there be this statistical correlation between desiring legal freedom and a tendency toward believing in One True Way to do things (not just politically)? I asked these questions of friends on Facebook the other day and everybody generally agreed it was true. The “why” question generated some interesting discussion. Do you guys have any thoughts about it?

I suspect that the same internal need for logical consistency which drives us to adopt a very unpopular political position (or some variation of it) also drives us to need logical consistency in the world around us. That doesn’t exist, of course, and we can sometimes end up frustrated when people can’t see what’s so obvious to us. What do you think?

I finally have official word about the lump I had removed from my breast last month. It was intracystic papillary carcinoma, which is so rare that there’s not much known about it. The good news is that it’s not very aggressive and is very unlikely to recur.

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