In his new book, The Tyranny of Dead Ideas, Matt Miller argues that “our leaders have failed to prepare us for what lies ahead because they are in the grip of a set of ‘dead ideas.’” Besides disagreeing with the theories that make his list, Miller misses the most dangerous kind of thoughts. Dead ideas we can deal with. It’s the undead ones that are truly terrifying.

Bad ideas are notoriously difficult to kill, but at least a few seemed to have been so thoroughly discredited we need not seriously fear their revival: interventionism, for instance, or the draft. But as every good zombie movie has taught us, the undead have a habit of not staying dead. And zombie thinking seems to be multiplying faster than zombie banks in the past few months.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be featuring a number of the worst ideas that have refused to stay six feet under. Check out some of the monsters we’ve profiled thus far.

Doug Bandow: Monsters to Destroy: Liberal Interventionism

Neoconservative domination of the Bush administration led to the common perception that conservatives were pro-war and liberals were pro-peace. But it was never so simple. The Clinton administration inaugurated one full-scale war and used or threatened to use military force in at least three other instances which involved no serious U.S. security interests. Now the Obama administration has threatened to revive the idea of liberal war-making, in the name of humanitarianism. It is an idea the president should bury.

Adam Hengels: Rent Control

In these days of economists constantly debating the right way to revive the economy, it seems like there is no way to find consensus among economists.  Economists don’t spend much time debating the issues they agree on, and to them, rent control is about as dead an issue as the earth revolving around the sun.  In 1992, 93% of American and Canadian economists surveyed agreed with the statement “A ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.” Opposition to rent control among economists spans the political spectrum from Milton Friedman and Walter Block to leftist Nobel Laureates Gunnar Myrdal and Paul Krugman.  In fact, it was the socialist Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck who famously said, “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing it.”

William Grigg: The Return of the Draft

Denounced by Virginia Governor Edmund Randolph in the very first speech of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, condemned by Thomas Jefferson, and pilloried by Daniel Webster, the idea of the draft has been rightly lambasted since our nation’s founding. Military conscription is impossible to reconcile with the 13th amendment’s prohibition of “involuntary servitude.” And it is inextricably bound in our national memory with images of widespread protest riots during the Vietnam War. Viewed from any angle, the draft seems to be not only an anachronism, but an incurably bad idea whose time should never come again.

And yet, somehow, it’s back.

Wendell Cox: Making Housing Unaffordable

The housing crisis isn’t over yet, as prices around the country continue to plummet. Despite the market’s continuing collapse, most commentary and analysis has managed to overlook one of the key factors in the creation of the original bubble: land use regulation that artificially limited the housing supply. Even worse, taking Rahm Emmanuel’s maxim to heart (let no crisis be wasted), officials at the city, state, and federal levels are coming up with regulatory and legislative measures to re-inflate this bubble.

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