Fundamentalists of big government

Fundamentalists of big government must engage in special pleading to appease their deity. For example, in this column, Harold Meyerson argues that

the state must ensure against periodic madness in the markets with regulations and social insurance, because madness is a potential threat in markets just as it is in other human endeavors -- because the market is a human endeavor, not reducible to a mathematical construct.

And the state is what exactly? Also, in case anyone imagines that the state, unlike every other human endeavor, is immune from madness, the history of the past century proves otherwise.