What is the economic system in the United States?

I'll admit it.  I'm confused. 
I don't think we can claim to live in a "free market capitalist" system any more.  Benevolent Fascism?  Randomly Occurring Acts Of Socialism?  Crony Marxism?  Vegas Paternalism?  Insider Protectionism?  Teleprompter-Driven Panic? 

I don't know if I could answer this Citizenship Test question correctly.  Lordy, who knows what the answer is going to be in a few weeks? 

Here's a definition that I've enjoyed posting every couple of months.  (If I'm not mistaken, the entry was written sometime during Bush's last year.)

As an economic system, fascism is socialism with a capitalist veneer. The word derives from fasces, the Roman symbol of collectivism and power: a tied bundle of rods with a protruding ax. In its day (the 1920s and 1930s), fascism was seen as the happy medium between boom-and-bust-prone liberal capitalism, with its alleged class conflict, wasteful competition, and profit-oriented egoism, and revolutionary Marxism, with its violent and socially divisive persecution of the bourgeoisie. Fascism substituted the particularity of nationalism and racialism—“blood and soil”—for the internationalism of both classical liberalism and Marxism.


Where socialism sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest”—that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it. (Nevertheless, a few industries were operated by the state.) Where socialism abolished all market relations outright, fascism left the appearance of market relations while planning all economic activities. Where socialism abolished money and prices, fascism controlled the monetary system and set all prices and wages politically. In doing all this, fascism denatured the marketplace.

Let's see....we've got a Department Of Energy jacking around with fuel prices.  Jeff Immelt of G.E. is whispering sweet nothings into Obama's ear while he outlaws bulbs he doesn't like and mandates the ones G.E. can make overseas.  Washington will soon be in charge of healthcare.  It appears that Monsanto has written more laws than any senator who ever lived, trying to control the freakin' food supply.  And on and on and on.....

I'm glad that Obama hasn't noticed my employer's fruitstand industry and its risky, unfettered, unregulated, free-wheeling....oh, wait.....now I'm hearing rumors that our Lords And Masters might declare that all produce has to be refrigerated. 

Never mind. 

We better get on board.