My good friend Don Boudreaux responds to The New York Times Book Review:
Editor, The New York Times Book Review
620 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10018
To the Editor:
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
Professor of Economics
George Mason University
All of the new ideas of modern liberalism are just variants on the very old idea that the individuals in society must be organized by and obedient to the state.
