>By the way, "police state" is a redundancy. States in essence or definition
>have police and armed personnel who have major force.
A functioning state must have some method of physically enforcing its rule, but by 'police state' I mean a state operating under the rule of police as opposed to a state operating under the rule of law.
There's a practical and important distinction. In a state operating under the rule of law, the laws of the state rule over the population. Citizens can find out what what these rules, what they are free to do and what they are prohibited from doing and, crucially, the state must also operate with the law and is prohibited (and if necessarily physically) restrained from interfering with the lawful activities of citizens.
In a police state, the citizens are ruled by the police. The state and the police force as a whole in particular is not subject to any law, or at least the law is not enforced in respect to the state (it makes little difference in practice) and the authorities of the state do anything they please.
It is inherent in the concept of political rule that the ruling force is subject to no laws except physics. The whole point of governance by the rule of law, which Americans seem tragically to be losing sight of, is that any elite which rules over the people and is subject to no restraint itself must inevitably tend towards tyranny. Hence the invention of a form of political government requiring no human tyrant(s), but merely artificial man-made laws.
As a socialist who believes that humanity must aim towards the elimination of political rule entirely, because political government is incompatible with socialism, I am naturally alarmed to see one of the most advanced capitalist societies regress to a pre-capitalist form of government.
I'm even more alarmed that socialists still fail to understand the significance of this.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas