Tom Woods is a self-proclaimed Traditional Catholic. He is also a free-market Austrain cheerleader. In recent yrs, there has been a inflitration into the Church not only of 60's liberal socialism, but also a Americanist tinged free-market/capitalist push from supproters in Conservative/Trad circles. Type in "Distributism' at AngelQueen or Fisheaters forum, watch what happens to the responses.

Woods decries Vatican 2 and the liberal/modernist assualts on the Church.Bravo, I am with him there.I too prefer the TLM  and when in Minnesota for the September Chesterton Conference ( http://chesterton.org/minnconf/index.html), will be going to the SSPX Mass in St. Cloud on my way out of town and back home.

Woods is supportive of the Confederacy for the same reasons I am-small land holding/businesses of the Jeffersonian tradition.he is a good historian, but as a historian, he is not a trained and certified economist, though he speaks like he is one and works for the Mises Institute, a Austrain school organization,For many yrs, Woods has shilled for them, he is-at last checking-a paid staff member now.

In a recent piece http://www.takimag.com/site/article/truth_charity/ he has continued to attack the Popes of the past 100+ yrs-long prior to V2-for being outisde their jurisdictions and basically out to lunch on economic theory.

I should add that the article was found at the Remnant newsite section.This is hte same Remnant that bemoans (rightly) the loss of Faith, V2, the failure to proote the Social reign of Christ, but enthusiastically endorses NWO McCain against the other NWO puppet, Obama.Chris Ferrera was gaga over Palin and surrendered to the fear mongering to supprot this ticket, the Remnant going along with his every word......so much for standing on Tradition...to vote for either was still operating in the same enemies camp. Donald Goodman of Distributist Review admitted he voted for principle as I had, for Baldwin.

Nonetheless, Woods states:

My book The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economymakes a distinction between those aspects of economics that fall within the Pope’s purview as a teacher of faith and morals and those that do not.  I’ll repeat that thesis here as a prelude to my comments.  (Anyone who already gets this can skip this section.)

The phenomena that economics touches upon, which include money, banking, exchange, prices, wages, monopoly theory, and many other topics, are replete with moral significance. But the positive, scientific statements about these phenomena that constitute the discipline of economics are necessarily value neutral. (By “scientific” I mean only that they involve causal relationships, not that economics is or should resemble one of the physical sciences.) Describing the workings of fractional-reserve banking is a positive task, not a normative one. Discussing whether such a system is desirable is a normative task, and qualitatively separate from explaining the mechanics of that system. One cannot make an intelligent comment about the former unless he understands the latter, and it is the latter with which economics, properly understood, concerns itself.

Likewise, economic policy may possess a moral dimension, but not a single proposition of economic theory involves a moral claim. For example, Frank Knight conceived of capital as a homogeneous unit whose individual processes occurred synchronously, and therefore could be understood without introducing time into capital theory. F.A. Hayek, as well as the Austrian School of economics to which Hayek belonged, conceives of capital as a series of time-consuming stages of higher and lower order, with the highest-order stages the ones most remote from consumers (mining and raw materials, for instance) and the lowest-order stage immediately preceding the sale of the finished product.

Nothing in the Deposit of Faith even comes close to deciding this and countless other important economic questions one way or the other. Not even the most uncomprehending or exaggerated rendering of papal infallibility would have the Pope adjudicating such disputes as these. Yet misunderstandings or ignorance regarding such seemingly abstruse points are so often at the heart of the policy recommendations that bishops’ conferences propose and papal encyclicals can seem to imply.

It is obviously not “dissent” merely to observe that the cause-and-effect relationships that constitute the theoretical edifice of economics are not a matter of faith and morals. They simply do not fall within the range of subjects on which a Catholic prelate is endowed with special insight or authority. Catholic laity cannot head up petition drives against them. They are facts of life. Facts cannot be protested, defied, or lectured to; they can only be learned and acted upon. There is no use in shaking our fists at the fact that price controls lead to shortages. All we can do is understand the phenomenon, and be sure to bear it and other economic truths in mind if we want to make statements about the economy that are rational and useful.

Moreover, those who posture as defenders of Catholic social teaching by and large do not acknowledge that the proposals they implicitly or explicitly advance could have anything but favorable consequences for all. No trade-offs (between higher wages and unemployment, for example) are considered. Naturally, no room for objections can exist when the very possibility of objection is foreclosed by the way the argument is framed: for example, if we want higher wages, we simply demand them. Anyone who does not join in this demand must not want higher wages. This begs the question, of course, since whether high wages can be produced by man’s ipse dixit, rather than through capital accumulation, is precisely the matter at issue.

For instance, the idea of a “living wage” for heads of households is an example of a policy I would institute only if, (1) I did not understand what factors lead real wages to rise on their own, without the use or threat of violence; or (2) I wanted to hurt people by making them less employable. (Why not offer a living wage of $10,000,000 per hour, if it’s so easy to raise wages by fiat?) I lack the space to defend this claim here, so I refer interested readers to my chapter on the subject in a book called Catholic Social Teaching and the Market Economy, published by London’s Institute of Economic Affairs in 2007 and available for free download.

It is certainly possible, though very unlikely, for a Catholic to reply this way: the Church insists that the living wage and whatever else must be instituted because justice demands them, even though they will make people, particularly those they were designed to help, materially worse off. However, no ecclesiastical document I have ever seen has taken this position. These documents carry the assumption that their suggestions will accomplish their stated ends and increase people’s well-being. That assumption, in turn, implies that the only thing standing between today and a more prosperous future is sufficient political will rather than constraints imposed by the very nature of things. And that merely assumes the very thing that needs to be proven.

It begs the question yet again to declare that authority has spoken and the matter is closed—the very matter at issue is whether these subjects are of a qualitative nature to be susceptible of ecclesiastical resolution in the first place. If the law of returns, for instance, is an objective fact of nature (which it is), then the Pope himself cannot declare it to be false, or expect success from policy prescriptions that ignore it, any more than he can fashion a square circle. It is no insult to papal authority to exclude the possibility of square circles. (As a matter of fact, leaving aside the famous and oft-misunderstood dissent of St. Peter Damian, the consensus among the Scholastics before the triumph of nominalism was that God himself could not violate the law of non-contradiction—by, say, creating a square circle.)

It is one thing, for example, to identify the well-being of the family as an important ingredient of a healthy society. It is quite another to propose specific policy measures designed to help families, since whether these policies will have their intended effect involves causal analysis, which, it should be unnecessary to point out, is analytically separate from faith and morals. Surely some matters are to be left to the laity to discuss and determine among themselves

So, theer we are, the Pope should zip it on economics, there are laws dontcha know. A good refute of the Spanish monks and Woodscan be found here:  http://distributist.blogspot.com/2005/03/distributist-apologetics-series-i.html

http://distributist.blogspot.com/2008/09/difficulties-of-thomas-woods.html

http://distributistparty.bravejournal.com/archive/08/20/2009

and also on our forum. Woods like many "cafeteria Catholics" wishes to pick and choose what he likes-or those that pay him.To be fully Catholic is to submit to the teachings of the Church...ask yourself, why is it that prior to V2, Catholic thought was generally anti-Capitalist? It likely was influenced by modernism, Enlightenment and William F. Buckley that began to erode Catholic teaching for its own purposes.Even many Cathoilcs in the so called Traditionalist movment have been taken in by this system so revered and advanced by Liberals and Protestants (Calvinism is a large part of propagating the Capitalist system, as the "elect" can prove their election by it sucess and the lording over the "unelect"). It fuses well with Americanist spirit. Thomas Storck said it well:

But if ever we should be blessed with such a restoration and genuine renewal, I fear that Mr. Woods will have asked for too much. For he would be among the first to feel the healthy discipline of a teaching Church that enforced her doctrines on her members and actually required Catholics to conform their lives and opinions to Catholic teaching. ( http://distributist.blogspot.com/2008/09/difficulties-of-thomas-woods.html)

Other refutes of Woods:

http://distributist.blogspot.com/2007/09/wrong-needs-to-be-righted.html

http://distributist.blogspot.com/2007/01/economic-science-and-catholic-social.html

http://www.distributist.blogspot.com/search?q=thomas+woods

Even Ferrera, a born-again Republican adn co-author, with Woods  of the Great Facade, refuted the "Austrian Heresy":  http://distributist.blogspot.com/2007/01/opposing-austrian-heresy.html

At sometime in the future, I hope to write my thoughs much more organzied in a article Looking Toward the Catholic Worldview...please excuse any mis-spellings, I am typing this quickly as I am on the run, my apologies for any mistakes! Some good sites I would refer you to are:

http://distributist.blogspot.com/

http://www.distributism.blogspot.com/

http://www.ihspress.com/

http://www.caelumetterra.com/index.htm