One TPMCafe member wrote (in response to my question as to why employers don't want to get out of providing health care): "Why don't you get out . . .and ask the employers this question?"

Well, I did in the book. And their answers persuade me it's ultimately about ideology. Here's a little excerpt from that chapter so you can see for yourself. I'd love to know what people think.

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Why doesn't business get out of health-care provision? It really does seem like it's more ideology and inertia than anything else. And not just on the part of business: I don't get the sense that it's really popular politically to suggest moving away from an employer-centric system. Which would seem to point to the need for a years long campaign of education and agitation. Led by Matt, of course.

Although I do really like another suggestion that Matt makes in passing in the book: That territorial HR chiefs at big corporations might be a significant part of the problem. Maybe if we just promised to pay them all really big retention bonuses ...

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I like Philip's idea about specialized health courts to get us past the casino of malpractice litigation (and the expensive "defensive medicine" that inspires). But the biggest dead idea in health care is that employers still insist on being at the center of our system of providing coverage - -even thought the skyrocketing costs are killing them -- and the fact that people can't get access to group insurance outside the job context means folks stay in jobs (or decide not to start new businesses) because they're afraid of losing coverage . Bad for business, bad for the economy, bad for people. So my question for TPMCafe readers and my colleagues is this: why on earth does business NOT want to get out of the business of being the main health care source for all of us? If they made it their goal to shift much of this financing burden to government, wouldn't they (and we) be better off?

I agree with Bob Litan that we'll get change, for better or worse. To get rid of dead ideas, and move forward to a good place, I think America needs to have a discussion on the principles for change. For example, Matt argues that schools should not be considered a local activity, citing dramatic inequality of funding among states, and the idiocy of states setting their own standards under NCLB. I think this is only partially correct--I believe in national standards, for example. But successful schools are uniquely a function of their particular culture, which is in turn driven by the personality and commitment of the people involved in that school. (See Chapter 5 of Life Without Lawyers: "Bureaucracy Can't Teach."). So to me the principle here is that "Responsibility for different decisions in schools should be given to the person or institution best able to meet the goal." So the feds can oversee national testing, and perhaps even set pedalogical goals. But the act of teaching and accountability should be mainly local, with federal rules far away from daily decisions.

Other possible principles for change:

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It may be wishful thinking on my part but I think that the current crisis and likely slow recovery will afford considerable opportunities for fresh thinking, including a willingness to reject some of those dead ideas targeted by Matt in his book. In effect, the current crisis has been akin to a rescrambling of the eggs that the late Mancur Olson argued was necessary to break the gridlock of interest groups. Wars can have this effect. So can deep recessions. It is at such times that people are most likely to question the status quo and be willing to embrace ideas for moving beyond it. Such times, of course, are potentially dangerous; they can lead to revolution. What Matt is calling for is a continuous, bloodless revolution in ideas. That can happen as parties to the old status quo conventions age and die. Or crises such as the current one can bring change much faster.

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Let me toss in a few thoughts. First, if you watched Obama's press conference Tuesday night, it's clear that the Dead Idea that will be hardest to bury is the idea that "Taxes Hurt The Economy (And They're Always Too High)". I thought the president was at his worst on all the questioning about the $7 trillion to $9 trillion he's slated to add to the national debt, and the reason is that it's taboo to mention higher taxes as one obvious thing we're going to have to do to close the budget gap once the recession is safely past. This is the only way to make the math work as 76 million baby boomers retire. I'm interested that Bob thinks the economic trauma we're going through will make it harder to raise taxes in a few years - he may be right, but my own hunch is that with retirement savings so decimated, it's going to be harder than ever to trim future retirement benefits, so somehow both parties will come up with a hand-holding way to boost taxes to help us get back to fiscal sanity (perhaps as part of some broader tax "reform"). More likely we'll end up doing some of both. But in any event, when Obama seems off his game, and tap dancing unpersuasively, it's a sure sign he's paying political deference to a Dead Idea.

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When I was reading through the seven Dead Ideas in Matt's book, I got most excited about "Your Company Should Take Care of You" and "Taxes Hurt the Economy (and They're Always Too High)." That's partly because they're the chapters are full of wonderful historical detail--about the rise of the corporate welfare state in the U.S. and past debates over tax policy--that I wasn't very familiar with. It's also because the ideas are so flawed and the fixes so straightforward: Get employers out of pension and health care provision, and raise our taxes enough to pay for what we want government to accomplish.

But Robert Litan's second thoughts about the inevitability of higher taxes got me second-thinking too. My reactions to a book like this aren't very good proxies for what the likely political realities are. So I'm curious, Matt (and all you TPMCafe commenters): Which of your Dead Ideas do you think are likely to keel over first?

Even as recently as reading Matt's terrific book, but before the furor over the AIG bonuses and compensation for execs of TARP-owned financial institutions, I shared Matt's view that inevitably federal taxes as a share of GDP will have to rise in order to meet our large and rapidly growing entitlement obligations. To be sure, some cuts in future benefits would be in the mix, but in the end I suspected that the tax/GDP ratio would settle somewhere in the mid-to-high 20s.

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Many dead ideas are institutionalized in law. The farm bill was passed in 1933, when 25% of the country lived on farms. In the year 2009 2% live on farms, and large corporations pocket $10 billion in entirely unnecessary subsidies. Pick almost any law, and you will find unintended consequences that tend to undermine the original goal. No Child Left Behind, special education laws, rules requiring due process for school discipline--these are rich lodes of unintended consequences. The meltdown on Wall Street-- certainly the result of a cultural hubris and regulatory laxity--at least has the virtue of forcing a change in values and law. What I worry about is the power of inertia in less dramatic circumstances. Washington itself is inert, crushed under layers of legal concrete- about 100 million words of law. Congress keeps passing laws, but almost never goes back to see how they're working, or adjust them to changed circumstances.
What's needed is not just to identify dead ideas, but somehow set in motion a continual effort to refresh the law of the land.

Thanks for joining this book club conversation about The Tyranny of Dead Ideas. The book is about how we get trapped in old ways of thinking that end up really hurting us -- about the threat now posed to our economy by the things we think we know. Look at the last 18 months and you'll see how this explains much of what's happened. The failure to explode a Dead Idea -- that Financial Markets Can Regulate Themselves -- got us into today's economic ditch (as even Alan Greenspan, the chief apostle of that perverse notion, now admits). But unless we now expose and move past the other Dead Ideas at the heart of the book - on health care, taxes, trade, schools, and the very idea of capitalism being an economic meritocracy - we won't find our way back to a durable prosperity.

When it comes to how we think about the world, I believe we're in a situation like 1928.

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This week at Cafe we have Matt Miller with us, book clubbing on The Tyranny of Dead Ideas: Letting Go of the Old Ways of Thinking to Unleash a New Prosperity. In it he dissects a series of conventional ideas - on education, free trade, health coverage, taxes - that are out of date and threaten our nation. From Matt's opening post (to go up shortly):

The book is about how we get trapped in old ways of thinking that end up really hurting us -- about the threat now posed to our economy by the things we think we know. Look at the last 18 months and you'll see how this explains much of what's happened. The failure to explode a Dead Idea -- that Financial Markets Can Regulate Themselves -- got us into today's economic ditch (as even Alan Greenspan, the chief apostle of that perverse notion, now admits).

Matt Miller is co-host of public radio's Left, Right & Center, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and author of The Two Percent Solution.

Joining him are Robert Litan, expert on antitrust, banking, and internet policy at the Brookings Institution and Kauffman Foundation; Justin Fox, business and economics columnist for TIME Magazine; Jeff Madrick, editor of Challenge Magazine; Philip Howard, author of The Death of Common Sense and founder of Common Good; Michael Shellenberger, president of the Breakthrough Institute.