Is authority a fallacy?

this is my first question ever here, so sorry if you guys are hard on spelling and/or capitol letters. to be specific, me and a friend had a disagreement about the appeal to authority fallacy, i made the claim that it was fallacious to agree with a statement because the person who made it seemed to have the relevant background in the subject (authority). he was right that this is wrong and that appeal to authority is to missrepresent a persons backround to make it seem fitting to the question, when it really is not. (or maybe im still wrong :)) but..
my question is still, is authority a fallacy? this is being discussed some in the libertarian community i believe..
some make the argument that the authority of the state is false since the rights of the state can not be had by any other entity. so why is it, and so forth? what logic does it rest on? that was a sidenote. so here goes.. My simple argument is often that the argument itself is the thing that is to be examined, and any argument or statement on a subject can be true or untrue regtardless of how proper or unproper your shooling and background is percieved. with an emphasis on the word, percieved. for example, the resistance to the current helio centric world view was in my opinion the sole result of the deep orthodoxy of the peoples beliefs, and the kollectivist schooling they recieved. if the argument of Gallileo had simply been put through the proper process, it would have been found to better explain the data of the night sky. and the point being, that this "process" of dealing with the argument and information, will work or not work in the same way, regardless of the schooling the person doing this has. a statement can never be true based on the person making it. so if this is true, what would that fallacy be called? to believe anything the person with the right degree is saying. plus a degree does not rule out alterior motives.
thank you/native of sweden