The stunning thing is, "the right" is actually a creation of "the left."

Think of a Democrat you know. Imagine you could go back in time ten or so years, and ask that person if they felt that a homosexual male couples should be legally recognized as "married", and allowed to adopt children with the same precedence as a heterosexual married couple. In most cases, they would have been appalled at these proposals, yet today most will readily vote for candidates who support exactly that.

If you were a "liberal" in the 1990s who stepped into a time machine, you might emerge ten years later to find yourself a "conservative", in this regard.

The same would have happened if you took JFK's "bear any burden" speech seriously, in which he called on the US to use any means, including military, to confront the dictators of the world -- particularly Communist ones. In 1961, such a position been compatible with -- even a defined part of -- "liberalism". Yet a mere decade or two later, the exact same stance might have marked you as a "red-baiting McCarthyite."

Likewise, if you had agreed with Martin Luther King's speech of 1963, that people should "not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character", you might well have called yourself anti-racist. Yet just a generation later, with "affirmative action" all the rage, Jesse Jackson (and the courts) would be insisting that to ignore race was to be racist.

My point here isn't about which policy is right or wrong: my point is that the left is "progressive" -- they come up with seemingly-new policies and embrace them. Those who fail to support this year's 'innovations' suddenly find themselves in this category called "the right." Ask Joe Lieberman or Zell Miller.

Since the dawn of recorded history, man has recognized property rights and condemned the violation thereof as "theft." Where property rights are protected, people will attempt to improve and exchange property to their advantage: this is called "labor" and "trade." When conditions permit, this is a naturally-occuring behavior: it doesn't flow from any particular ideology; it is recognized, at least to some extent, by every religion and civilization in the world.

Then one day, a man named Karl Marx (and his associate, Friedrich Engels) coined this term "capitalism" to describe societies where employers owned the means of production. (Strictly speaking, it would seem this term could actually be applied to many agrarian societies, since "land" would have been the means of production.)

Marx and his followers also came up with terms like "Socialism" and "Communism" to describe various approaches to rectify this situation, solutions which involved taking property away from some people and giving it to others, obtensibly to make things more "equal."

Over time, if you didn't support these 'innovations', or felt that people should be able to continue to own, trade, and improve their property, you would be called a "capitalist" -- even if you never owned what Marx might have termed "capital", property such as factories, railroads, etc.

And of course, for every -ist, there is a corresponding -ism. Thus "Capitalism" eventually came to be treated -- by friends and foes alike -- as if it were an ideology of its own.

For example, in 1986, while calling the US to repent of actions taken to defend against Communism, Reverend William Sloane Coffin asserted that "Jesus would never be 'soft on communism' any more than He would be soft on capitalism" -- as if "capitalism" wasn't simply, in his usage, the absence of Soviet control.

But the opposite of "Communism" is not "Capitalism", it is freedom. In a non-"Communist" society, religious believers can still decide to freely share all their goods among each other. And they can support their commune by making and selling goods to those outside -- or even try to be entirely self-sustaining; whatever they choose. In a "Communist" state, they would be placed in jail for their beliefs and for their non-state-endorsed ecomomic activities -- collectivist or otherwise.

So why write this now, now that Communism is moribund? Because we learn from history. We see the same trend even today: A comparatively small but influential group of people coin new terms, and thus generate new false dichotomies and new diagnoses for all those who fail to take the proper position. For all its rhetoric asserting the exact opposite, the it is, in fact the left who largely controls the terms of today's political debate.

So even though I don't hold that economic activity is life's ultimate goal, and think the term is absurd, I must call myself a "capitalist" to make clear that I do believe work and trade are helpful. I must now call myself "right wing", despite having no historical allegiance to the term, to make it clear I'm not in favor of the left's current political soup-du-jour.

And I find myself opposing gay "marriage", even though the term itself makes no sense at all ("marriage" meaning a union of opposites) -- and though I bear not an ounce of ill will toward any gay or lesbian. For all of recorded history, it has been understood that, though variances have always existed, the male/female union has been at the core of society. Today -- do I need to mention it? -- such beliefs are termed "heterosexist", and the corresponding -ism, "heterosexism", is being treated as a pathology in our universities.

Again, the left sets the terms of the debate, and creates the right out of the dissidents.

The term "capitalism" serves as a reminder of this, a monument documenting how a completely normal and helpful behavior, present from the dawn of history, came to be treated, at times, as a minority -ism, and for many, the moral equivalent or inferior of a system of compelled labor and absense of personal freedom.