Those interventionist policies fueled massive capital malinvestment including housing and credit bubbles, all of which culminated in the greatest economic bust in 80 years.

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Undoubtedly, Mundell understands that government efforts to improve upon markets are counterproductive, sometimes fatal suboptimal under the best of circumstances, disastrous if the interventionist policies persist.

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Indeed, besides the other difficulties in the business climate among them exchange and price controls and other interventionist policies the threat to private property (including land) has been growing.

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Activists are unlikely to be content with measured actions even though more interventionist policies have often proven unworkable or even counterproductive, damaging the broader public health agenda in the process.

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When Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists were driven out of China, they adopted interventionist economic policies in Taiwan and nationalized dozens of major businesses-such as the Bank of Taiwan, still one of the island's biggest banks.

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The markets, having priced in a bailout of Lehman based on the savior of the much smaller Bear Stearns, learned the hard way what happens when overly interventionist governments change their policies on a daily basis.

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