Why are liberals afraid to call their philospohy what it is?

I think the discussion of economic philosophy is one area where conservatives are victims of their own success. Throughout the Cold War, 'communism' was reviled as inherently evil. I don't think it is; we were at a war not to stomp out communism, but to extinguish totalitarianism (and I guess it's debateable whether communsim can ever exist outside totalitarianism). Totalitarianism and the deprivation of individual rights is certainyl barbaric, but we are the confusion of that with communism prevents us from being able to discuss labor movements on their actual merits.

Labor unions, plain and simple, advocate communist principles. Under free markets and capitalism, there is no such thing as a 'right to work' (unless of course you refer to the right to *not* have to join a union) or a 'right to a living wage' anymore than little girls have a 'right to a pony'.

The beauty of freedom, liberty, free enterprise is that there are no restrictions: business owners are free to hire whomever they want, workers are free to contract to give them their labor.

Furthermore, giving 'rights' to a job, healthcare ro whatever other schemes to left dreams up cheapens real property rights. By definition, there can only be one type of 'right' that can never be broken, recognizing more rights than that will mean that they will at some point come into conflict and authority will have to make a value judgement of what supercedes what. When the freedom of a small business owner to make economic decisions about his company comes in conflict with an employees supposed right to work, should we ever be able to say that the owners has more of an obligation to the employee than what has been agreed to in a contract?

Government certainly has a role to play in preventing discrimination, protecting the *real* rights of parties that were shortchanged. And there are many policies that are productive but certainly not rights: providing free secondary education and subsidizing higher education is an important part in letting individuals acheive whatever they can dream.

But discussing a job as a right has no place in capitalism. Which leads me back to the start of this post: if society finds it productive to give more protections to workers, lets at least call it what it is. Communism is not inherently evil, it just flies in the face of traditional American values. That's not areason itself to reject currently proposed labor laws, but let's call them by their real name.