It is inaccurate and shocking for you to say that in England in the NHS they will not give you chemotherapy for cancer if you are over 65. I live in Devon, England and I know two people around 65 who have had chemo from the NHS and are managing.In the country as a whole there must be thousands.

The real problem with the NHS is if you have a problem that needs treatment but is not urgent. Then you can wait and wait.This fact explains the paradox of a country with a National Health Service free at the point of consumption in which more and more people take out private medical insurance.

However if you are badly injured or otherwise have a serious or chronic illness the NHS, metaphorically speaking, is a godsend.

Bu the trouble is, that approach is equal to a doctor treating a symptom but not addressing the disease. Abortion is a vicious evil, but it istill only a sympton of the bigger disease. Yet the New Right seems to be perfectly willing to further the interests of moderism and feminism by putting a woman in the White House (yes she is only running for Vice President THIS time, but it is clear that she is being aimed at the White House, either through the death of a 72+ year old President, or as his annointed successor). And putting a woman in the White House has been a mian goal of feminism for years.

This is tantamount to losing the war just to win one battle.

My usage as I am sure you know is the Classical Liberal, IE, a Grover Cleveland Democrat.

"I would rather not speak of Rockwell, whom I knew well once upon a time, except to say that he evinces little interest in Catholic moral theology"

Well, aside from a few emails/suggestions I've sent him, I dont know him. I wrote Rothbard a letter way back in 1994 (I think to his Las Vegas office? I think he moved back to Manhattan by that time) but never got a reply, so I didnt have the pleasure of meeting him before his tragically sudden death, either. I will not comment further on the LvMI and your differences, except to say I think they are not as different as you might believe. Like you said, let's worry about that 10% difference *if* we ever get there. Lord knows the state hasnt shrunk any since Rothbard's days.

This is not the place to discuss this, though I would be happy to set up a discussion in a few weeks on the question of liberalism and the Church. A few anticipatory points: 1) It does not matter what most Catholics think, what matters is what the Church teaches; 2) The Church's teachings on social justice, going back to Christ and his apostles, are a complex that is best viewed through the lens of Aristotle, Cicero, and St. Thomas. They have nothing to do with either socialism or liberalism. 3) Liberalism evolved as a subversive movement to undermine all traditional authorities, that of the King, the Church, the aristocracy, and ultimately, of property-owners, husbands, and parents. There are many splendid insights in the liberal emphasis on personal dignity, but its philosophical foundations in Locke et al are quite simply false and false in a way that subverts the Christian understanding of man. At the heart of liberal theory stands the emancipated individual who possesses some magic quality known as rights. This rights-bearing individual is a fantasy who does not now and has never existed.

The Christian/Catholic view of man acknowledges him as a corporate being whose identity is defined in part by his obligations to parents, friends, nation, etc. Where this became confused, at least in retrospect, is when liberal nation states emerged and began making their own set of false claims on people. At that point it became rather easy to mistake socialism for Catholic morality. But Catholic thought was fixed long before the invention of the modern state, and the best way of understanding it is to invoke what has been called "the well-known principle of subsidiarity. At the very least, this principle tells us that the government of the US should not be doing what the states can do better; that the states should not being doing what cities and counties could do better; that cities and counties should not be doing what neighborhoods and private associations can do better; and that for the most part these lowest communities should not be doing what families can do better. On a practical level, it means that roughly 90% of what the federal and state governments do is a usurpation of authority. On this basis, Rothbard and I shook ands and struck a deal that there was no point in quarreling until we had stripped government of 90% of its power. At that point we could engage in polemics.

To sum up. The dichotomy between liberty-loving liberals and the Catholic tradition is entirely false. In fact, from an historical sense, liberalism, in destroying every bond between man and man and replacing them with the cash nexus--to paraphrase Marx and Engels--prepared the way for an inevitable socialist revolution. The way back to sanity and strictly limited government is not to attempt to reconstruct the liberal state--which got us into this mess, as so many people at the time said it would--but to recover a deeper and more ancient sense of the human person and society. Liberal economic theory and analysis is not to be despised as a part of this reconstruction, since on a pragmatic level it shows how futile and destructive are the redistributist policies of the socialist state.

Laying this aside, I agree wholeheartedly with one of the key points in the original article: voting for the "lesser of two evils" is still evil.

".., but please, let’s be careful and accurate in identifying the war-mongers and charlatans in Christendom..."

I would not go so far as to say 'charlatans'. One should be careful on judging another man's devotion to Christianity as we know not what lies in a man's heart. To be sure, there are some were it seems justified. Good example: Joel Osteen. In my view, what the man promotes (pray to God and get rich!) is downright blasphemy.