Some people are so blinded by their ideology that they can’t see the obvious.

Ro Khanna, a California Congressman, is one such person.

Unlike many ideological warriors, he is actually quite consistent and usually pretty smart. For instance, he came out looking pretty good in the Twitter Files, being one of the few people in government who was repelled by how Twitter and the Left were trampling the 1st Amendment. I was impressed, and sad to see that he didn’t get more kudos for standing up for civil rights.

On economics, though, Khanna is as ideologically blinded as they come. He is convinced that bigger government is the solution to all economic ills. Look at his take on the decline in life expectancy over the past couple of years:

If you don’t believe corporate greed has deadly consequences, take a look at the decline in American life expectancy. We need #MedicareForAll, and we must raise the minimum wage. pic.twitter.com/haY3CFEQGt

— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) January 11, 2023

That’s quite a take, especially for somebody who is likely to run for Senate. Citing CDC statistics (look at the chart), he appears to have forgotten that during exactly those years a global pandemic was raging.

He thought there was an outbreak of corporate greed instead. As if, perhaps, greed suddenly appeared in 2020 after 40 years of decline.

Did Ronald Reagan defeat corporate greed in 1980, when the chart begins its long climb up? And did Donald Trump, in his last year of office spark a dramatic increase–so dramatic that 2 years of life expectancy evaporated in an instant? I don’t think Khanna was trying to argue that the Reagan Revolution led to lifespan increases, and Trump’s policies led to a spike in greed in 2020.

Apparently, by this logic, that is exactly what happened.

If a sudden spike of greed is the problem, the solution is an increase in the minimum wage and socialized health care.

Now of course fewer people were earning the minimum wage in 2020 and 2021, when the massive drop in life expectancy happened. The government was paying them to stay home, and paying so well that many low wage workers didn’t go back to work. That is why there is a labor shortage.

And would Medicare for All solve the problem of hospitals overwhelmed with patients suffering from delayed care? Visit an emergency room these days; they are overflowing, and it isn’t due to solely to COVID. It is due to people who delayed care during the pandemic and are now sicker than they needed to be.

Medicare for All wouldn’t solve that problem. Look at Great Britain and Canada–they can’t provide services, except for killing off the ill in Canada. That they can do right quick.

It wasn’t patients or insurance companies that delayed treatments for cancer, or preventive care, or discouraged people from going to medical facilities because they were supposedly petri dishes of COVID patients just waiting to kill everybody off. It was people like Khanna and the CDC who did that. It was doctors who focused exclusively on COVID, forgetting that prior to its appearance people were dying of other things.

That’s why the excess death rate in the US and the OECD far exceeds the COVID death toll. People are dying of all sorts of other things that never would have killed them except for stupid COVID policies. Like fentanyl abuse, which skyrocketed over the past couple of years.

Sweden was the only OECD country that avoided the excess death crisis, and we all know why. They have the lowest excess death rate in the Western world because they chose a rational path to dealing with COVID.

Khanna suffered a massive ratio, of course, since his tweet was so stupid that it was the easiest target in the universe. After a couple hours of total embarrassment he managed a response–digging the hole a bit deeper.

Khanna isn’t stupid. He is actually very smart. Not that I care much for credentials, but his are impeccable. University of Chicago degree in Economics and Yale Law School. He is probably one of the few members of Congress who would be fun to debate because he is smart as a whip. I respect his intellect, and I can’t say about many people these days.

But he is also completely blinded by ideology, at least on some matters. He literally appears to have forgotten COVID and COVID policies as a cause for the decline in lifespan. And his attempted cleanup of the mistake was so lame that it was laughable. Not even AOC would have said something so stupid.

I hope not, anyway. Biden might have, but he probably forgot about COVID too, for other reasons.

Having an ideology is unavoidable, at least for most of us. We need an intellectual framework to sort out the massive amounts of information that comes at us every day. Without some framework to make sense of the world, none of that information turns into actionable knowledge. There is just too much information about too many things to create a logical framework for every bit of information.

But geez. Your categories can’t be so rigid that you forget over 2 years of history. Can you?

Obviously the answer is “yes.” Yes, you can ignore something as important as COVID was to declining lifespans if you believe all the ills in the world are caused by capitalism.