The sins for which the original Welfare State was meant to pay were the sins of the capitalist economy and market competition, of capital which could not stay solvent without enormous social costs in shattered existences and broken lives – the costs which it refused, however, to pay, or could not pay underthe threat of insolvency. It was that damage for which the Welfare State promised to idemnify the present victims and to insure the prospective ones. If we hear now that we, the ‘taxpayers’, ‘cannot afford this any more’, it only means that the state, the community, does not see it fit or desirable any more to countersign the social, human costs of economic solvency (which under market conditions is equivalent to profitability). Instead, it shifts the payment to the victims themselves, present and future. It refuses the responsibility for their ill fate – just as it has abandoned the old task of the ‘recommodification’ of labour. No more collective insurance against the risks; the task of coping with the collectively produced risks has been privatized.