Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. challenges GOP presidential contender Ron Paul's views that government equals tyranny -- a view that is shared by many on the right. But what kind of nation would this be if that view prevailed, Pitts asks?

Can government be overlarge, overbearing, overwhelming, over restrictive, over intrusive? Of course. And where it is those things, it is the right -- and duty -- of the electorate to pare it back.

On the other hand, unless you enjoy salmonella in your food and lead in your paint, unless you think it’s OK that your doctor has no medical degree and your lawyer no license, unless you’re fine with breathing sooty air and drinking tainted water and unless you really think a black woman in Mississippi, locked out of public places by threat of violence and force of law, should have been required to wait on market forces to rescue her, you must regard Paul’s moral imbecility with a certain appalled awe.

Heaven help us if the intellectual rigidity he symbolizes is really the only alternative to the intellectual malleability of so many of his colleagues [.]

At its best, government vindicates and defends a people’s noblest ideals. The Civil Rights Act was government at its best. Paul disputes this and styles himself a defender of freedom for so doing. Too bad he can’t spend a day being black in Mississippi in 1964. He might emerge with a better understanding of that word.

Read Leonard Pitts Jr.'s entire column at the Miami Herald.

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