Which Institution is More Enlightened?

Here's a letter that I sent on Saturday to the New York Times:

Reacting to Rand Paul's remarks about the 1964 Civil Rights Act, you say that his libertarian philosophy "is a theory of liberty with roots in America's creation, but the succeeding centuries have shown how ineffective it was in promoting a civil society….  It was only government power that … abolished Jim Crow" ("Limits of Libertarianism," May 22).

You've got it backwards.  Jim Crow itself was government power.  Jim Crow was...