David McElroy

Some people are addicted to the idea that government-enforced monopolies are a good way to get things done. They’re idiots. I don’t any way to be polite. Some ideas don’t deserve to be taken seriously. They deserve to be ridiculed and treated with contempt.

John C. Dvorak is an idiot. I already knew that before today, but he cemented his place in the Idiot Hall of Fame with a column he wrote for PC Magazine last week. Dvorak — who we’ll call The Idiot for the remainder of this article — has been trolling the Internet for years by making absurd predictions and saying factually inaccurate things, but I suppose the magazine keeps him around because people know who he is and because he at least gets people to come click on the site to view ads. This time, though, he’s into territory that I wouldn’t expect the Onion to go.

The Idiot has proposed that our email system would be better off if we turned it over to the U.S. Postal Service. No, I’m not kidding. No, he doesn’t seem to be kidding. No, it’s not April Fool’s Day.

I’m not going to demolish The Idiot’s argument. I’m not going to even go over it point by point. I merely bring it up to point of that as long as we live in a system that allows other people to rule over us, we are at the mercy of idiots such as Dvorak. If enough people agree with The Idiot, we could have our email — run by various companies competing with each other — taken away and turned over to government-sponsored employees.

Only an idiot could think that’s a good idea.

Note: I have friends who work for the USPS. Some of them aren’t idiots. Some are quite bright. It’s the monopoly top-down system that’s the problem.

It used to be common sense that black people were inferior to white people. It used to be common sense that man couldn’t build heavier-than-air machines that would fly. It used to be common sense that fireproof asbestos was a wonderful substance to build with. And it used to be common sense that a rocket couldn’t possibly operate in the vacuum of space.

We all recognize each of those as fallacies today, but they were the accepted conventional wisdom of their days. When are people going to learn that what they see as “common sense” is frequently just a sum total of the biases they’ve picked up along the way?

It’s frustrating to me that so many people have no patience for intellectual complexity and nuance. They’re so impatient (and fundamentally anti-intellectual, in some cases) that they can’t take the time and effort to understand something other than the conventional wisdom that they know — even if they complain about the status quo. They can’t see outside of a very small box.

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It’s not difficult to know where power lies in a society. Just watch where the money accumulates. As the United States grew in the 19th century, the money was in New York City and the other major centers of commerce and industry. The Industrial Revolution was creating wealth like nothing that had ever been seen, and it was reflected in the places where the ideas originated and the work was being done.

As the country grew westward, there were pockets of opportunity and money created wherever people were doing interesting and exciting things to create something new. The Midwest became a center for agriculture and various types of industry. Bigger cities in the South started growing, including here in Birmingham, where it was called “the Pittsburgh of the South” because of it being a major center of steel production. California became home to the wealth of the new and growing entertainment industry. And Silicon Valley eventually boomed when it became the center of the high-tech world.

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