What do we call the United States today? Surely no longer free in the classic sense of the word. How can the nation be considered "free" when the government takes billions of dollars on a whim from taxpayers to use to prop up failing businesses?

So, how do we characterize the United States today and where, as a nation, are we going? Yuri Maltsev, an economics professor at Carthage College in Wisconsin, has some ideas.

"The US today resembles that of Russia in 1917, Cuba in 1959 or China in 1948," he says in a recent essay.

That is an interesting statement indeed, coming from a man who in a previous life worked as an economist under Gorbachev in the Soviet Union. It is definitely food for thought. Read his essay here.