I think we may have a few of This subspecies of human thought running around slashdot. A few, anyway. I don't think I quite caught the great man's humor, or charity for his enemies, but I think I came close. Final version will have the name of the girl from Rhode Island who slipped my mind, but is an excellent example of the stereotype of this heresy.

Are you better off than you were 4 years ago? While it is a bit early to ask this question of the Obama Administration- the tail end of the Bush Administration was bad enough that taken together these 35 indicators say most Americans are worse off.

Or at least partially. This certainly makes libertarianism more tempting- I'm for regulation of the free market, because it's obvious that an unregulated market will oppress people. But some of these regulations are just silly.

Taiwan is an example of distributism working in practice. Of course- they need to US Navy to keep them safe from Chinese invasion.

I'm leaving this a user journal instead of a submission for two reasons: One, it's not news, many people for the past 5 years have been talking about it. Two, it's a little too fantasy and not enough science fiction, despite the topic being a "truth is stranger than fiction story".

In 1968, at the end of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI was writing a bunch of documents. One in particular was pretty much laughed at by the world, and in America, became a cause to leave the church, dissent from official church teaching, or just ignore it. Almost NOBODY followed it's recommendations. But that paper, Humanae Vitae, made four testable predictions. If, it said, the contraceptive mentality was to take hold in any country, that country would see four effects:
1. An overall lowering of moral standards

2. A rise in infidelity and illegitimacy
3.
The reduction of women to objects for men's pleasure
4. Government coercion in reproductive matters
 
  Not only has every one of those predictions come true, but it's not just social conservatives who have noticed, but also run of the mill secularist sociologists.
 
In other words, Pope Paul VI went out on a limb saying "this is our faith, this is why, and this is an experiment you can try to prove it", and in our ignorance and laughing at him, we were stupid enough to try the experiment- and all four of his predictions were the result.
 
That's what you call verification of a theory.

He's a fascist, which can contain some elements of socialism, but only those that give more power to his crony capitalists.

I present the Actual Secret Catholic Teaching on why contraceptives are evil.

It must be secret, because in the last 20 years since this encyclical was published, I've never ONCE heard either a priest or a Bishop utter the word "Contraceptive" until the last 3 weeks.

Was Operation Safehouse entirely a setup to kill Derrik, winner of a grisly comic death at LibertyCon last year?

" Investors, workers and consumers have been divided to the point that we have forgotten we are all vital components of something called free enterprise, totally dependent upon each other. If the public's lack of understanding is not soon corrected the public may soon do great and irreparable harm to itself by demanding more interference than we already have of government."

--Ronald Reagan

In News to Nobody except those who worship capitalism, proof has come that just 147 corporations own 40% of the world- and a larger group of just 1,318 corporations (the 147 are included in that) own 80% of the world's most productive wealth. Many of these companies are in the "too big to fail" range- the 2007 dataset used included Lehman brothers, who were in the top 147 at the time.