How not to make friends and influence people

As my legions (ha!) of readers well know, I am a died in the wool conservative with libertarian leanings, but on my Twitter feed, what I'm finding is that many people on the port side of the aisle actually like what I have to say--and it's not that I'm changing, but rather that we are finding we have something in common.

Along those lines, an interesting link I saw from one of these "likers" was an explanation of why the left didn't run away from Zohran Mamdani in New York City and the like.  It goes like this:

• If you have $0, you get welfare
• If you have over fifty million dollars, you get bailouts (and I might add, corporate welfare)
• If you have $2300 in savings, you qualify to fund the whole system and get lectured about how to budget better

 What's being illustrated here, really, is that what we have in our country is not capitalism with a safety net, but rather mercantilism--and it might be added a mercantilism that our President and his adherents fully support.  It is you and I, after all, that got stuck with the bill for Trump's six bankruptcies--those bankers taking the loss had to get that money from somewhere, and you have an account.

So we might infer that a way to reach the left, yes, even the progressive left, is to abandon mercantilism and go closer to classic conservatism.  WHen the progressive left sees that we are no longer subsidizing the rich, they're going to listen to us better when we point out that government run grocery stores and rent control lead to hunger and homelessness.