Business is about risk though. The entrepreneur envisions a demand for a product and then builds the capacity to fulfill that demand. If the investment in production capacity were risk free there would be much more capital available for that endeavor. Who would make the investment risk free though? The government? Or in the case of our recent housing bubble catalyzed by the brave new financial world, some thinly capitalized derivatives underwriter?

China has much more intervention in their economy to do this sort of thing, with the banks acting as partially privatized central planning. The role of government in economic planning is certainly an area for policy wonks to carefully consider. In a democracy there's a bit too much incentive for the public to, as Marx noted, vote themselves money from the public treasury.