In what’s quite a surprising development, Russian Prime Minister and former President Vladimir Putin warned the West not bail out too many companies and to stop interfering in their economies.

“Interference of the State, the belief in the omnipotence of the State: that is a reaction to market failures,” Mr Putin said in his keynote address at the opening of the four-day meeting. “There is a temptation to expand direct interference of state in economy. In the Soviet Union that became an absolute. We paid a very dear price for that.”

Putin’s words are surprising because he and President Dmitry Medvedev have started copying the behavior of the Soviet Union in quite some ways. It is clear that Putin believes that interference in the economy was the Soviet Union’s true mistake (about which he is probably correct; the Soviet Union would have been a far more dangerous adversary if it would have developed a free and strong market economy).

It’s also surprising because Putin doesn’t normally about other countries. The world has changed however; we have all become increasingly dependent on each other. If Western economies crumble, Russia too will suffer.

There’s another (domestic) aspect to Putin’s remarks; the Russian economy too has suffered major blows in the last year or so. It’s likely that many Russians want their government to do what the American government did yesterday; invest heavily in the economy. Russians are more used to an active government than Americans are – when the going gets rough, people want what they know, no matter how destructive it has been in the past.

Putin may not be speaking as much to the West as he speaking directly to those Russians. He makes clear to them that he believes that bailout and major stimulus packages will hurt the economy in the long run.

And he’s right.

Western lawmakers are in serious trouble when a Russian leader tells them they are interfering too much in the markets. It’s a sign that they’re overreaching. Republicans understood this, as did 11 Democrats; the majority of them, however, voted for a bill that would make Americans more dependent on the government, that hurts the economy in the short to middle run and does little to nothing in the long run. Other Western governments could follow suit, although most ’stimulus packages’ consist out of merely bailout out banks in Europe. At this point in time, that is. Now that America passed a major stimulus package, European laborites and socialists will undoubtedly demand their governments do the same.

If so, we’re all putting a tremendous burden on ourselves, our children and our grandchildren.

Lets listen to Putin for once.