More material for the leftists in your life:
the Republicans have more in common with leftists than they do with Democrats:
I am mystified about how anyone but an adolescent with little understanding of the complexity of the world could believe in libertarianism, or for that matter any reductionist political creed that offers easy solutions to complex questions. I can understand why adolescents buy into libertarianism, or Marxism, or any number of philosophies that offer bold, straightforward solutions, but how can anyone a few years older who has spent time in the world and confronted its complexity and encountered its diversity retain any hope that there is a single Theory that has a universally applicable Answer will deliver the right results in all contexts and settings? The world is a mess. I’m not arguing for relativism here, but for an appreciation that the world is too complex for there to be any one-size-fits-all solution to its many problems. When I see grown-ups advocating for libertarianism, my main thought is that I wish that they would grow up and go learn how the world really works.
To my mind, libertarianism is the bizarro universe twin of Marxism, and just as silly. Whereas Marxists rejects the market and places unwarranted faith in the benevolence of the state, libertarians reject the state and place unwarranted faith in the benevolence of the market. Just as a state with no checks on its power will become autocratic, with its leaders pursuing their own narrow self-interests, so to will a market with no checks to its power lead to collusion and eventually monopoly. The market works extremely well in situations where the basic assumptions about complete information and so forth hold, but any deviation from those assumptions create opportunities for exploitation and concentration.
...In my view, a true conservative recognizes that the world is complex and there are no simple solutions for anything, so change should be incremental, cautious and above all, evidence-based. To me, the essence of conservatism should be an inductive approach to policy, according to which policy choices are shaped by experience of what works and doesn’t work in the real world, not an deductive approach in which policy is made by reasoning from first principles.
By this standard, self-styled conservatives in the 1990s, and probably earlier were no longer conservative. In the 1990s, Republicans were radical, not conservative. Their thinking was deductive, not inductive. Especially in the House, Republicans advocated views rooted in ideology, not experience or evidence. Some of these, most notably the mania for cutting taxes, were not justified by any empirical evidence, and indeed were contradicted by most available evidence. Rather than advocating cautious, incremental, evidence-based change, Republicans wanted to burn everything down and roll the dice on solutions. The primary standard for choosing a policy seemed to be that it felt right. To me, this wasn’t conservative, but radical. Intellectually, it is no different from the approach of Marxists and other leftists who chose policies by reasoning from first principles, appealing to laws of history, without any regard for whether any evidence suggested that the policies they advocated actually worked.
https://medium.com/@camerondcampbell...395#.b16s8uef1