Hey, What's the Big Idea?!

Here's a letter to the New York Times Book Review:

A theme that runs with approval throughout Jonathan Alter's review of recent books on modern "liberalism" is that "liberals," in contrast to their mindless Cro-Magnon opposites, overflow with ideas ("The State of Liberalism," Oct. 24).

Indeed they do.  But these ideas are almost exclusively about how other people should live their lives.  These are ideas about how one group of people (the politically successful) should engineer everyone else's contracts, social relations, diets, habits, and even moral sentiments.

Put differently, modern "liberalism's" ideas are about replacing an unimaginably large multitude of diverse and competing ideas – each one individually chosen, practiced, assessed, and modified in light of what F.A. Hayek called "the particular circumstances of time and place" – with a relatively paltry set of 'Big Ideas' that are politically selected, centrally imposed, and enforced not by the natural give, take, and compromise of the everyday interactions of millions of people but, rather, by guns wielded by those whose overriding 'idea' is among the most simple-minded and antediluvian notions in history, namely, that those with the power of the sword are anointed to lord it over the rest of us.

Sincerely,

Donald J. Boudreaux