It is a crying shame that, to get the reasonable libertarianish benefits of reduced government cash flow and regulation, one must also sign on for really ugly stuff,
True. That is a feature of representative versus direct democracy. One mitigating factor is that people, such as yourself, who are not neocon or social conservatives are influencing the party policies. The fact that Alliance support includes libertarians, classical liberals, economic conservatives and social conservatives (including born-again types) prevents the party from having much of a social agenda beyond support for widely popular measures such as public health care. They don't even discuss things like abortion at party meetings.
of which subservience to a foreign regime is only one
Very wrong. There is no way in hell one can accuse the Alliance of being subservient to anyone just because they happen to agree with a foreign power on a particular policy. Both the Bush administration and the Alliance are economically conservative, and both (unfortunately) have some degree of social conservative support, so it is not at all surprising that they agree on something. Saying Alliance policy is subservient to U.S. policy is akin to saying Chretien's policies are subservient to Chirac's.
BTW, note that I speak of Alliance policy, not Harper's policy, because Harper does not have the power to make Alliance policy. OTOH, Chretien does have the power to make Liberal Party policy.
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