When I sat down with former Vice President Dick Cheney for a CNBC interview this week, I asked him about all this. He wasn’t happy. Of course, many of these policies began during the Bush-Cheney administration, and Cheney didn’t deny it. But when I asked if he anticipated the current degree of government control, he gave me another honest answer, as is his custom: No.

Regarding the banks, Cheney said the bailout work was done over at the Treasury (under Henry Paulson), and that no critical studies were performed by the White House. Cheney himself opposed the GM bailout, preferring Chapter 11 bankruptcy. He did sign on to the TARP bailout of banks as a stop-gap measure. But he didn’t anticipate its eventual size, scope, and sweep. Then, squarely acknowledging the mistake, he compared Bailout Nation to Nixon’s wage-and-price-control program, which touched every enterprise in America. He called it “a terrible mistake; a huge mistake.” By implication, Cheney suggested that the original Bush bailout program was itself a big mistake.

As for Nixon’s wage-and-price-control policy, the former veep reminded me that “we finally got out of it, but it took a long time to do it, and it [did] a lot of damage.”

Cheney was very critical of Obama’s big-government spending-and-borrowing policies, too, telling me that there are only two ways out: inflating the money supply or big tax increases. He doesn’t like either. Yes, Cheney believes Obama has taken Bailout Nation and government stimulus way beyond anything the Bushies ever contemplated. Nevertheless, the damage is done.

Cheney recalled Bush having said that “we have to suspend free-market capitalism in order to save free-market capitalism.” So the big question is this: How long before we resurrect free-market capitalism, and how much damage will current policies do in the meantime?

I won’t lose my faith in this country’s long-term future. But the issue of how much damage we sustain before returning to the policies of free-market economic growth is very much on my mind.