Draten, despite the fact I may "annoy you in the extreme," many officers are bullies by nature. This is not necessarily a bad thing. In his Republic, Plato did a good job of defining "silver souls," the protectors of the Republic, and akin to soldiers. The fact that a "bully" personality lends itself to police work does not mean every officer is a bully. Nevertheless, many officers do get upset with the crooks, and "falls" do happen all too often. At least, that's my experience. On one hand, I can't blame them -- I'd like to hit everyone who annoyed me. On the other, their training should make them better than that. Most of the people they deal with are annoying, but our society has defined rights of opinion and speech for those people.
Anyway, [img]graemlins/rant.gif[/img] off. You did mention one thing of great interest. In my opinion, freedom is useless (from a social standpoint) without concurrent responsibility. Being completely free is almost hedonistic -- freedom in and of itself can go too far. Freedom is one of the extreme ideals of the American society that must be tempered by other ideals. Freedom and equality cannot both completely exist hand-in-hand, for instance. As Hayek and Mill point out, pure liberty necessarily leads to inequality. However, for the American, Freedom and Equality are antitheses which must be balanced. Though both can never exist in pure form at the same time, they are opposing poles, antitheses, which must endure a constant dialogue and search for balance. If you look at American history, you will see that sometimes liberty has dominated the national mindset (for good, the right to privacy, and ill, the right to contract) and sometimes equality has dominated (for good, the Civil Rights Act, and ill, namby-pamby lawyering that leads to a criminal getting to sue the owners of the home he broke into). In the end, though, freedom must be tempered by responsibility.
