More on "Catholic Randians": A short response to Eduardo

I appreciate Eduardo's post, responding to mine.  He and I agree on a lot in these posts.  So, like him, I think that I think that "it is worthwhile for Catholics to call attention to the utter irreconcileability of Rand's political philosophy, such as it is, with basic principles of Catholic teaching."  (I would say the same about some other political-philosophy "takes" that are influential today, too.)  I also agree with him that "from the standpoint of a Catholic politician, at least, the principles matter."  I understand Eduardo to be saying that it could be true *both* that Politician One is, in terms of subjective culpability, within the realm of "permissible prudential disagreement" for supporting Policy X while Politician Two -- who supports Policy X for unsound reasons -- is not.  At the same time -- and I imagine Eduardo and I agree here, too -- the question whether a particular politicians is within the realm of permissible prudential disagreement is not the same as the question whether the policy itself is, in fact, morally defensible. 

And, I agree entirely with Eduardo that it is incumbent on Catholics who claim to be within the realm of permissible disagreement to assess carefully their empirical assumptions and predictions.  (I would say, for example, that many Catholics were too quick to embrace and proceed on the basis of the assumptions -- which were asserted often, leading up to the last presidential election -- that reasonable regulations of abortion do not materially reduce the number of abortions and that public funding of abortion does not materially increase the number of abortions.)  Where it sounds like we part company, I suppose, is precisely on the facts, on what assertions are actually "counterintuitive", and on the most accurate way to characterize what, in fact, the Ryan proposal does.