When we think about the U.S. economic being liberal we forget the war complex. The U.S. has not only the second biggest army, but the most expensive. This isn't just about 1.5 million soldiers, but also about huge supporting companies, which means mercenaries, logistics, weapon production, etc. In a way that's like the natural way because of the extremely positive economic effect the two world wars, as well as the cold war and and pretty big number of invasions the U.S. did. I think with stuff like atomic bomb tests and maybe even the space program they tried to do things in a more peaceful way.
So in the U.S. you have the problem everything that looks like government spending is called socialism, communism or whatever (evil stuff). That comes from all the deep propaganda and as a way to justify everything (see all the stuff the Freedom of Information legislation revealed, but is unknown by the public, though official).
Still the government needs to be there and has some means of controlling things. Tons of jobs need to be created and if the free market fails to create them (and come on, don't think of it like a dogma. It isn't perfect.) then the government needs to invest money. I mean think about it. If war suddenly ended and everything would be peaceful the U.S. would be the first country to "die", even though they have other nice tricks like USD for oil, etc. I think they also have lots of other economic powers, but I don't think anything could really jump in if there was no need for the military. Also China is pressuring a lot. Everyone with some attentions know that they will replace the U.S. as a super power and they possibly can't even do anything about it, because I think in a war China has a much bigger chance to win these days.
This doesn't mean any of these countries is bad. It's just a historical development. And if they would change it right now a huge crisis could evolve. I mean there is much more behind this. Everyone waits for the other one to show some kind of weakness. This isn't something you can simply turn off. It would be awesome, but also quite utopian.
I am sorry for disillusioning people. It would be great if things were better and I don't know, the U.S. would really be about freedom and peace of France would really be about fraternity and the communist countries would be about people that meet on the same eye level (like in the original idea, stopping the class war). It would be nice if a free market could simply solve all our problems. All these things can't solve anything.
Everything that ever made things better is people who didn't really (even if they maybe count themselves as one of them) care about any of these, but actually worked together to make things better. I mean that's the foundation stone of civilization, but goes even deeper. Humanity emerged as the dominant life form because they worked together. Of course others do too, but we have a great number of thinking individuals that are awesome and communicating (sharing data for all the geeks.
) and reach goals because of that. The position we are now even makes things a lot easier. We created so many tools to help us with all these things. With technology and science we pretty much found a way to take evolution into our own hands. We don't need to, lets say evolve hours brains to telepathy, because we can just phone, send an SMS, email or use VoIP. We don't need to evolve to be faster at telling our children what we know, because there are books.
Well, anyway. I think that's kinda off topic, so I'll shut up.