CT Blue

If you’re a Paul Krugman fan, you have no doubt read more than one column or blog post about the fact that the right refuses to learn from experience. I think the latest example he cited is the failure of Sam Brownback’s Kansas “experiment”. That experiment has decidedly failed, but Sam and the rest of the right have learned no lesson, and continue to believe (or say they believe) that throwing money at the rich in the form of lopsided tax cuts will deliver an economic Nirvana.

I’m currently reading Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking by Daniel Dennett, and was reminded of Krugman’s frequent complaint when I read Dennett’s description of the Sphex moth. (As a side note, Apple’s auto suggest feature knows all about “Sphexishness”) The moth feeds its young by paralyzing a cricket, bringing it to its nest, checking the nest to make sure all is well, dragging the cricket into the nest, laying its eggs, and then leaving the larvae to fend for themselves, with the still living, but paralyzed cricket as food. However, if someone moves the cricket by a few inches while the Sphex is checking its nest, it will move the cricket back to the nest entrance and re-check the nest, ad infinitum if one keeps moving the cricket. At least, that was the initial knock on the Sphex, until it was discovered that not all of them were quite that stupid. The liberals among them learned their lesson, while the conservatives among them never seemed to do so.

Now, at first glance it might seem that stupid Sphexes (not sure if that’s the plural) and Republicans are completely analogous, but that’s not really so, for reasons to which Krugman has alluded. It may be quite true that tax cuts for the rich don’t benefit the rest of us, but they do benefit the folks to whom politicians such as Brownback are beholden, so unlike the Sphex, the Brownbacks and their billionaire backers achieve their real objective with every seeming failure. The real Sphexes are the mass of people who keep voting for the Brownbacks of the world.