Here’s my weekly update on what Tony Flood has been up to in his dismantling of the Chris Ferrara book on the Church and libertarianism.  (In recent days I am told Ferrara has denounced the author of an article on McDonald’s — there evidently being, as usual, a single allowable Catholic opinion on that question.  But it is the Austro-libertarians who are the cultists, you understand.)

Last week I added to Flood’s ample arguments by showing how unfamiliar Ferrara is with modern research on the enclosure movement; he relies instead on long-exploded theses from the early twentieth century.  This week Tony adds, helpfully: “We take the occasion of this post, our fiftieth, to remind our visitors that we do not belabor Mr. Ferrara’s errors on enclosure (or on anything else) because we believe they are in a close competition with the truth. We do so only to discredit the rhetorical performance of a propagandist. No one except theologically like-minded individuals already disposed toward his conclusions take his historical opinions seriously.”

This week Tony makes the rather significant point — significant, one might think, for someone who considers himself “pro-life” — that the Industrial Revolution made possible the sheer survival of countless millions of people who could not have been integrated into the pre-industrial economy.

And in a funny post, he reveals what Ferrara leaves out in the ellipses he inserted into a quotation from T.S. Ashton, the great historian of the Industrial Revolution.