What Makes a Police State?

How do you know your country is no longer free?

There has been a paranoid streak in American political life as long as there's been such a thing.  Patrick Henry famously "smelled a rat" at the 1789 Constitutional Convention, fearing that rather than tinker with the Articles of Confederation as they'd been commissioned to do, the end result would be a far more powerful central government which would appropriate powers previously belonging to the states.

As the saying goes, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you: Patrick Henry's fears were spot on.  Our Constitution did in fact create a much more powerful central government than had the Articles of Confederation; Henry vehemently opposed ratification of the Constitution and George Washington's Federalist policies.

The French Revolution, however, illustrated that there are times when you actually want some degree of central power; Mr. Henry changed his tune, and by his death was a staunch defender of the centralizing features of our Federal government.  He wound up excoriating the anti-Federalism of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, saying that their stroppiness would lead to civil war - yet another well-justified fear of the prescient Governor Henry.

Today, we are surrounded by overweening government on all sides.  Our Federal government intrudes into domains properly the prerogative of the states.  Our states meddle in issues best handled by local towns or counties; and government at all levels increasingly dominates aspects of daily life where it has no business at all.  Any one of us can be arrested at any time for violating one of the myriads of laws we've mostly never even heard of.  Are we living in a police state?

More to the point, when do you know you're living in a police state?  Yes, we regularly see reports of people harshly punished for petty offenses, but it's still quite rare.  Every government will be oppressive sometimes; where does it cross the line?

Uh... not really.

Rule by Laws, Not Men?

The first response might be, that a police state rules by fiat of the powerful and not by law.  Certainly there are plenty of examples of totalitarian states that work exactly this way: North Korea and Stalin's Russia operated according to the commands of the dictator, nothing more, nothing less.  Modern Africa is stuffed with countries where there is nothing resembling the law; if you're a friend of the President-for-Life, you can get away with anything, and if not, you can suffer any sort of abuse at the hands of anyone who is.  Obviously, the secret police of such a nation have no accountability to the people and are feared and dreaded by everyone save their masters.

An absence of the law is not a requirement of a police state.  Nazi Germany was the ultimate police state, and yet the Nazis were absolute sticklers for the rule of law.

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