The Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce is laying on a free spread for legislators under a big tent at chamber headquarters from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. today outside the chamber office at 1200 W. Capitol Avenue.

The leaders of the legislature have decreed that such meetings of the General Assembly don’t qualify as public meetings under the Arkansas Constitution but no reason you can’t look from a public sidewalk across the street. If you spot your own legislator, ask them to run you out a snack.

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Under the tent, they’ll be talking about passing out taxpayer-financed “incentives” or subsidies to noble private businesses and figuring out ways to deprive welfare deadbeats of health care, food stamps and such. Which reminds me of this Martin Luther King Jr. quote that circulated on the web yesterday:

Whenever the government provides opportunities and privileges for white people and rich people they call it ‘subsidies.’ When they do it for Negro and poor people they call it ‘welfare.’ The fact is that everybody in this country lives on welfare. Suburbia was built with federally subsidized credit. And highways that take our white brothers out to the suburbs were built with federally subsidized money to the tune of ninety percent. Everybody is on welfare in this country. The problem is that we all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor. That’s the problem.

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