Real balance is only judgment that you make based on experience. With experience and having seen lies from both sides, you are able to see teh slant and remove it. It also helps if you can see any underlying agenda.
Milton Friedman was a neoliberal rather than a neocon.
Neocons started on the left
'The movement emerged during the early 1970s among Democrats who disagreed with the party's growing opposition to the Vietnam War and had become skeptical of the Great Society's welfare programs. Although neoconservatives generally endorse free-market economics, they often believe cultural and moral issues to be more significant, and so have tended to be less thoroughgoing in opposition to government intervention in society than more traditionally conservative and libertarian members of the Republican Party'
'Nevertheless, the origins of their ideology on the left are still apparent. The fact that most of the younger neocons were never on the left is irrelevant; they are the intellectual (and, in the case of William Kristol and John Podhoretz, the literal) heirs of older ex-leftists.'
'For the neoconservatives, religion is an instrument of promoting morality. Religion becomes what Plato called a noble lie. It is a myth which is told to the majority of the society by the philosophical elite in order to ensure social order... In being a kind of secretive elitist approach, Straussianism does resemble Marxism. These ex-Marxists, or in some cases ex-liberal Straussians, could see themselves as a kind of Leninist group, you know, who have this covert vision which they want to use to effect change in history, while concealing parts of it from people incapable of understanding it.'
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism