I am a conservative, and this is a conservative news and opinion site. I in fact have great sympathy to libertarian ideas that revolve so much around property rights, but it is not the sum total of conservatism, nor even the focus of it. I think that preservation of institutions of society,— church, religion and culture chief among them — is more important than maintaining free market, especially in the sphere of ideas where next to nothing of value has emerged in the past half a century, and that is being charitable. You seem to have a childish idea that conservatism is akin to nazism. You need to grow out of it.
I would, again, remind the reader that the encyclical was given in 1832. Since then, much has changed, especially in the mass culture, and consequently the needs of censorship shifted to things like movies, television and the Internet, and away from books. Another change is that the civilized world was govered by “princes” as His Holiness put it — in other words, by hereditary rulers whose power was a form of property right. We are almost universally governed by elected leaders, and our obligations of loyalty changed accordingly. It is hard, for example, to pledge allegiance naturally owed to a prince, to a team of professional politicians propelled into electability by the media elite, who treat the entire domestic product, it seems, as their own wallet. If we indeed had a free market, property rights system worth preserving, I’d be all for it, but I don’t think we do, and what has remained of it will be soon rendered worthless by the scam artists in DC.
The separation of society and state is, ultimately, the difference between a free society and a totalitarian regime. In both philosophical and practical terms, people who turn to the state for cultural support are eqivalent to people who turn to the state for financial support. In both cases, the result is to degrade the petitioner, destroy the petitioner's ability to be self-sufficient, and ultimately to destroy the very thing the petitioner is trying to take without earning.
If we indeed had a free market, property rights system worth preserving, I’d be all for it
I am reminded of the hypocrisy of greenies who assert that nuclear power is not viable because of the high cost of building a new plant, when it is their own obstructionism that contributes heavily to those costs in the first place. To cry crocodile tears over government interference with the free market while demanding such interference in the name of culture is no more persuasive.