My mediocre response to an excellent article

Below is my response to The Cold War Never Ended, an excellent article by Michael C. Moynihan at Reason magazine:

This is a quibble, but one that I believe to be important.

Time and time again I see communism compared not to democracy, but to capitalism. To do this is to fall into a verbal trap set by communists and their sympathizers in which the war between freedom and slavery is cast as a contest between two economic theories.

Many people do not know what the word capitalism means. Many more have been influenced by the whispers of leftists into believing that it is something distasteful or even evil.

Capitalism is the economic consequence of liberal democracy. It is economic liberty, but it is dependent upon and flows from political liberty.

It is political liberty which is the actual counterpoint to communism, not merely the economic consequence of that liberty. Leftists dare not make the direct comparison between liberty and communism because to do so is to concede defeat. Only the profoundly foolish and insane will knowingly and willingly enslave themselves. So instead they compare communism to capitalism and work to undermine the public's understanding of the latter.

By using the terms that the left prefers you hand them a victory.

I'd also like to point out a flaw in your reasoning behind the statement that “the Cold War will never truly be settled by the side that won.” Simply because someone was living in a western democracy does not mean that they were on the side of that democracy. There were and continue to be many communists living among us for whom the fall of the Evil Empire was a personal tragedy.