Robert F. Bukaty / AP

Lt. Mike Murphy of the Newton, Mass., fire dept., carries an American flag after observing a moment of silence in honor of the victims of the bombing at the Boston Marathon near the race finish line, April 22, 2013, in Boston, Mass.

Were often told that our liberties are under assault. The right warns that our Big Government nanny state is plotting to seize our guns and our Big Gulps, while strangling our economic freedom with taxes and regulations. The left rails against our Big Government security statethe drone warfare, indefinite detention and electronic surveillance that make the war on terror sound like an Orwellian nightmare. The National Rifle Association had just finished bellowing about background checks violating our Second Amendment rights when the American Civil Liberties Union started shrieking about the FBI violating the Boston bombing suspects Miranda rights.

America was born from resistance to tyranny, and our skepticism of authority is a healthy tradition. But were pretty free. And the Dont Tread on Me slippery-slopers on both ends of the political spectrum tend to forget that Big Government helps protect other important rights. Like the right of a child to watch a marathon or attend first grade without getting massacredor, for that matter, the right to live near a fertilizer factory without it blowing up your house.

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Our government needs to balance these rights, which is tough sometimes. But not always. Requiring gun owners to pass background checks and restricting access to high-capacity magazines would be a minuscule price to pay to help avoid future Newtowns and Auroras. If the FBI waits a few days to read Dzhokhar Tsarnaev the Miranda boilerplate hes already heard a million times on Law and Order, the Republic will survive, and the authorities might learn something that will help prevent another tragedy. (In fact, if Americas ubiquitous surveillance network hadnt captured Tsarnaev on video, he might still be at large.) Even in a free enterprise systemespecially in a free enterprise systema factory owners right to run his business without government interference is trumped by the public safety rights of the local community.

In the Obama era, Tea Party Republicans like Senator Rand Paul have portrayed the U.S. government as a threat to individual liberty, an oppressive force in American life. They just want government to leave us alone. But while the Stand With Rand worldview is quite consistentagainst gun restrictions, traffic-light cameras, drone strikes, anti-discrimination laws, anti-pollution laws, and other Big Brother intrusions into our private livesits wrong. And most of us know its wrong, which is why we celebrate our first responders, our soldiers, our law enforcers. Theyre from the government and theyre here to help. We know our government is fallible, because its made up of people, but we still count on it to protect us from terrorists, from psychos with guns, from exploding factories. We also need it to protect us from floods and wildfires, from financial meltdowns and climate change. We cant do that kind of thing ourselves.

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I dont want to imply that we live in a Game of Thrones episodeour nights are dark but only occasionally full of terrorsbut last week, an Elvis impersonator trying to poison the president didnt even make the front page. Theres dangerous stuff out there, and while its probably fun to Stand With Rand, Im more inclined to stand with the public servants keeping us safe, even when the al Qaeda operative they ice in Yemen is an American citizen, even when they shut down an entire city to hunt for a single teenager, and yes, even when they try to regulate coal plants and oil rigs and Wall Street casinos that would greatly prefer to be left alone. Thats why I pay my taxes, and thats why I dont feel like Im being tyrannized when I pay them.

I guess you could call me a statist. Im not sure we need public financing for our symphonies or our farmers or our mortgageshistory will also recall my Stand With Rand on the great laser-pointing controversy of 2011but we do need Big Government to attack the big collective action problems of the modern world. Our rights are not inviolate. Just as the First Amendment doesnt let us shout Fire! in a crowded theater, the Second Amendment shouldnt let us have assault weapons designed for mass slaughter. And if the authorities decided it was vital to ask Tsarnaev about his alleged murder of innocents before reminding him of his Fifth Amendment rights to lawyer up, I wont second-guess their call. The civil liberties purists of the ACLU are just as extreme as the gun purists of the NRA, or the anti-regulatory purists in business groups like the Club for Growth.

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The Case for Freedom From Terrorist Bombings, School Shootings and Exploding Factories