The "Trickle-Down" Zombie

The New York Times's Paul Krugman routinely decries what he calls “zombie ideas”—those that survive despite overwhelming contrary evidence. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D – Ma.) should take note. Her recent attack on conservative tax policy is one that has long lost its battle against facts.

On Wednesday, the senator averred:

The Republicans have a pretty simple philosophy: they say if those at the top have more — more power for Wall Street players to do whatever they want and more money for tax cuts than somehow they can be counted on to build the economy for everyone else. Well, we tried it for 30 years and it didn’t work. In fact the consequences were nearly catastrophic.

The closing of the left-wing mind

“…Letters that have an untrue basis (for example, ones that say there's no sign humans have caused climate change) do not get printed,” The Los Angeles Times proudly announced last year. The newspaper was not alone in expressing such sentiments. Other influential news outlets, such as BBC, have asserted the same. But what explains this close-mindedness?

In The Closing of the American Mind, Professor Allan Bloom describes how the idea of “openness”—relativism and subjectivism—renders the existence of, and hence the search for, moral and philosophical truths a fiction.