Why can't self-satisfied liberals admit that conservatives care about people, too?

Consider the minimum wage. Many conservatives oppose raising it, especially as high as $15/hour, as some municipalities around the country have opted to do over the last few years. Do they take this position because they prefer lower-wage workers to struggle? No. They take this position because they understand basic principles of economics, which predict that raising costs for businesses that employ low-wage workers will lead them to make fewer hires, thereby hurting these workers overall. (A study released earlier this week seems to indicate that this is precisely what’s been happening in Seattle since the city began incrementally raising its minimum wage.)

The same holds for the concerns that led the original neoconservatives to make various proposals for reforming crime and welfare during the 1970s and ’80s — proposals that powerfully influenced policymaking at the local and federal levels during the 1990s.