WASHINGTON -- Matt Miller gives me a headache.

If his name doesn't ring a bell, wait until his new book, "The Tyranny of Dead Ideas," gains traction in the national debate about how to fix The Current Mess.

Miller's diagnosis of what ails us is grim but optimistic. (You have to learn to think paradoxically.) And his prescription for a cure is painful because it requires something most humans resist: Change the way we think.

Before we can fix the economy, health care, Social Security, education and other problems, we have to rethink some of our most sacrosanct premises.

Here's a paradoxical thought to get you started: We have to increase taxes and federal programs to save the capitalist system.

I know, I know. But don't dismiss Miller without hearing him out. He has some compelling ideas that, though they seem at first counterintuitive, are ultimately reasonable. It is first necessary to suppress the instinct to remain comfortable in the familiar and to calm the knee that aches to jerk.

Miller -- a journalist (Fortune columnist and host of the radio show "Left, Right & Center,"), Democrat and former economic aide in the Office of Management and Budget under Bill Clinton -- has singled out six second-nature, but dead, ideas about how a modern economy ought to look.

If not corrected, he argues, our very economic model could be threatened as other nations lose faith in capitalism's ability to improve the lives of everyday people.

The dead ideas are that: our children will earn more than we do; free trade is "good" no matter how many people it hurts; employers should play a central role in the provision of health coverage; taxes hurt the economy; "local control" of schools is essential; people tend to end up, in economic terms, where they deserve to.

Is this man insane? More government? More taxes?

With a few tweaks here and there, Miller's dead ideas sound an awful lot like core American principles. (Exceptions: Even some hardened free-marketers will acknowledge the X factor of "luck," a subject Miller explored in his previous book, "The Two-Percent Solution.")

But he's got a point. In fact, he's got several.

The world has changed in significant ways and our old formulas simply no longer work. We once thought, for instance, that financial markets can regulate themselves. Whup. The disasters of 2008 proved that assumption false. If only we had noticed it sooner. Did dead ideas block our vision? Continued...