CF,

You’ve missed the kind of statism which Wretchard mentioned and which I had in mind when I wrote my comments: social statism.

Sure, corporate welfare has its own evils, but if one adds up all of the money spent on:
-public education (while we lag behind the rest of the developed world)
-Social Security (which grows incessently and upon which people have become dependent)
-Medicare & Medicaid (ditto from SS)
-Welfare (and the cost of the dependency culture which even the liberal Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned about)

the amount is staggering. Just staggering. It’s far more than any war we’ve ever fought or bank we’ve bailed out.

Soon we can add socialized medicine to the list. And then we’re like Europe, except, unlike them, we also have a military to pay for, too. For now.