Whenever someone now calls for state intervention in the financial crisis, the question inevitably arises as to what the state, the politicians, and the government have been busy doing before now. Is the popular criticism true that prior to the big crash the state did almost nothing, or pursued an inadequate, too “neoliberal” oversight of its economy? Is the state really the great problem solver, or is it perhaps part of the problem? The simple, apparently scarcely known truth is that the state has done a lot; and without it neither “the market” and the real economy nor “the financial system” and its current crisis would have come about. The entire premise is absurd: as if “the economy” is simply there and the state later intervenes as a kind of impartial arbitrator.

• The state protects property – and thus the essential basis of the entire market economy. Without a state, nobody would work for wages. This state guarantee excludes all those who might have a toothbrush, a car or an mp3 player but no capital from all the resources they need to provide for their own livelihood. They and the vast majority of the population must seek work and go to work as “dependent employees.” They are made “dependent” on those whose assets the state protects. These people, the employers, can use their money or other resources (factories, buildings, land, etc.) in order to make more money by letting others work for them, “profitably” of course – otherwise they would not even begin producing, trading, renting houses, selling and leasing land, etc.

• The state ensures with its slips of money paper (reprinting them is illegal!) that everyone can take part in the wealth of society – this “immense accumulation of commodities” – only to the extent that they earn, spend or save its legal tender. It makes any other access to wealth a punishable offense.

• The state ensures that the banks can generally do business with money and earn interest. The creditor/debtor relation could not even happen without state enforcement! All credit relations are legally fixed and supervised up to the point of bankruptcy and foreclosure.

• Through its central bank the state makes sure – in short – that the banks have sufficient credit available to them in order to gain by lending to the rest of the business world.

The state apparently wants an economy in which companies make profits through the exploitation of their staff. It also wants a financial sector which constantly supplies these companies with sufficient credit and its stock market and derivatives sphere always grow bigger and more powerful. This is because the state budget lives on taxes from the growth of its companies and financial investors, as well as on wage taxes and corporate taxes. A successful economy which produces a steady monetary growth allows the state to go into more debt. It gives it more influence in the world of competing capitalistic nation states, economically as well as politically.

• That is why the government is taking all sorts of extra steps to ensure that the “pillars of society” – companies such as banks – run successfully. It removes whatever obstacles stand in the way of their profitability, including the (modest) wage demands of the unions, burdensome social spending or environmental laws, etc.

• These obstacles include regulations on financial speculation. Because the state wants the financial world to speculate on the growth of the American economy and because it wants as much speculative financial activity to take place in this country as possible and not abroad where it will be held by foreign banks, it has eliminated previous restrictions and given its speculators enormous freedom and thus encouraged the development of innovative financial products.

As if the state has done nothing, did not pay enough attention or something! It is exactly the opposite.

The state itself has built up speculation and has vigorously supported exactly that sector which now in its crisis brings everything into disarray.

If this state now takes every conceivable measure to save “the system” (the arsonist and the fireman) – what does it really want to save? Exactly what it has created, promoted and upheld and what for decades it has owed the economic growth of the nation to: It wants to rescue the banks and the stock exchange so that the growth of its economy functions again.

Whether the leaders will succeed or not is uncertain. For everyone who does not own companies or banks and is not at home in high finance, now is a good time to ask whether they really want to continue to contribute to this – so that after the crisis everything simply goes on as it did before!

• The beneficiaries of the system – the owners of money and factories as well as the state – want nothing more than this and have good reasons to do so.

• For everyone else who thinks that they too must cross their fingers for the rescue of the system and beg with a mixture of hope and apprehension for government support – their reasons are not so good. They are based on nothing other than their own dependence on the profit calculations of the factory owners and money owners.

• Of course, if businesses fail or companies go bankrupt, the workers are badly off, people are used to this. But if profits rise, if the economic cycle returns to what it was like until recently, does it really go well for them then? Even in the most flourishing phases of the market economy, there are lousy wages, long working hours, stress on the job and job insecurity.

So how do average people benefit from the restoration of the financial sector?