Living in a nascent police state

"Lady Liberty" has a bad day, attributing the bad day to fear:

By definition, a police state is one in which the citizens are afraid of the police. Thanks to Supreme Court rulings that say the police can pull you over for pretty much any reason at all including the fact that you seemed a little nervous; to other rulings that suggest drug sniffing dogs aren't really a bona fide search or that saying "no" to a search is justifiable cause for a search; to stories of cops who plant evidence or who — with some justification — are so nervous themselves on traffic stops that they overreact, sometimes with deadly force; I'm invariably afraid of the police.

By definition, a police state is one in which most aspects of citizens' lives are tightly controlled or at least subject to oversight. Thanks to overzealous drug war crusaders, I can't freely buy over-the-counter medications when I want to, and certainly not in any quantity. Thanks to overzealous terror war crusaders, I can't mail books to my elderly mother without enduring a hopelessly serious game of "twenty questions."

By definition, a police state is one in which the police can arrest you at virtually any time. Thanks to a virtual labyrinth of tax laws, any of us could be subject to detention at any time for breaking laws we didn't know existed; far worse, we could find ourselves in trouble for following a law that ensured we broke another one because the two are direct contradictions of each other. In other words, the tax code is such that, if some authority wants an excuse to come after you, one's tailor made and ready to go.

In many ways, the growth of new laws, rules, regulations, and "precautionary measures" has been unmatched in the last three-and-a-half years. You don't have to be paranoid to feel that your day-to-day activities are more and more tightly constrained by new controls.

War is said to be the health of the state, and the kind of war the United States is currently fighting is a massive I/V drip of steroids for rent-seeking bureaucrats, petty power-hungry officials, and the kind of small-souled, blue-nosed conformists who attempt to stamp out the new, the different, and the challenging.