GraniteGrok

Entertaining for the slightly wonky set - or if you want to see economics portrayed as Hip-Hop (sorta).  I am of the free market persuasion in that people should be allowed to make up their own minds and have the freedom to be in the market as THEY wish - and not under the rubric of "but we know better" as the Keynesian believers as all Progressives are.  After all, without the reins of control, they'd be, er, free marketers which is hardly the truth (e.g., Obama's words of not wanting to run the banks, the car companies, the hospitals certainly belie his actions).

(H/T: Cafe Hayek)

I also though these charts show that the US does NOT run under a true free market environment (Barney Frank and the Left's words to the opposite).  From the Cato Institute:

The number of federal subsidy programs soared 21 percent during the 1990s and 40 percent during the 2000s. The entire nation is jumping aboard Washington’s gravy train. My assistant, Amy Mandler, noticed the recent addition of two new Department of Justice programs, and that pushed us over the threshold to reach 2,001.

There is a federal subsidy program for every year that has passed since Emperor Augustus held sway in Rome. We’ve gone from bread and circuses to food stamps, the National Endowment for the Arts, and 1,999 other hand-out programs from the imperial city on the Potomac.

...Most people are aware that federal spending is soaring, but the federal government is also increasing the scope of its activities, intervening in many areas that used to be left to state governments, businesses, charities, and individuals. To measure the widening scope, Figure 1 uses the program count from current and past editions of the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance. The CFDA is an official compilation of all federal aid programs, including grants, loans, insurance, scholarships, and other types of benefits.

Figure 2 shows the number of subsidy programs listed in the CFDA by federal department. It is a rough guide to the areas in society in which the government is most in violation of federalism—the constitutional principle that the federal government ought not to encroach on activities that are properly state, local, and private.

As the federal octopus extends its tentacles ever further, state governments are becoming no more than regional subdivisions of the national government, businesses and nonprofit groups are becoming tools of the state, and individualism is giving way to a more European desire for cradle-to-grave dependency.

Yet recent election results indicate that Americans may be starting to wake up and fight back. Whether we are more successful than Cicero and Cato the Younger in battling to retain our limited-government republic remains to be seen.

 The more that the Feds encroach, the more it spends, thus the more it grabs from its citizens....