It's the intellectual chaos that is the really frightening thing. Those who believe most fervently in the free market are the very people who hate most the spectacle of watching free-market favouring governments attempting to save it.

This is because they see ulterior motives where there are none. They imagine that everybody from the slightly less likely candidates – step forward, George Bush – to the slightly more likely candidates – stop giggling, Gordon Brown – has been poised breathlessly, awaiting this moment, so that they can usher in a new era of socialism. If only any world leader really did possess such a diabolical degree of strategic intelligence...

As for Gordon Brown's supposed enjoyment of the present crisis, he's merely hysterical with happiness that he's a couple of points up in the polls he's been poring over for so many months with such gloom. Tony Benn may be relishing the idea of nationalised banks, and a chorus of other lefties might be yelling: "I told you so!" But everybody else is just scared. And annoyed.

People in the real economy are simply gobsmacked that they now have to pay the Government money in tax, so that it can then be given to the banks, who will then lend it back to them with interest, so that they can buy the stuff that will keep China's economy growing, so that it can underwrite the US government, so that ... Oh lordy, maybe one or two world leaders do possess a diabolical strategic intelligence after all.

Or maybe the markets really do have a supernatural intelligence, and are every bit as good at self-regulation as James Lovelock explains that the planet used to be, when it was left to its own devices. What the Simon Heffers of this world stubbornly choose to ignore is that the collapse of the world economy, not its government-led mini-salvation, is the radical left's wet dream.

Environmentalism was widely believed, until recently, to be nothing but the last refuge of those who hated capitalism, because they despised themselves. The left's economic arguments had been roundly disproved, so they started banging on about sustainability, man-made planetary disaster and the perils of endless consumption.

Governments and ordinary people may latterly have started listening to these prophets of doom – who do, after all, have the entire scientific community behind them. But what they really couldn't work out was how actually to change people's habits or even change their own, in order to avert disaster.

Market logic dictated that economies had to keep on growing, which made the cutting of carbon emissions almost impossible to do. Creating new wealth, for politicians, seemed like the only way of guaranteeing ever-increasing revenues, anyway, for their ever more ambitious and misguided plans – whether those were plans to spread liberal democracy through invasion and war, or spread social democracy through clunky, prescriptive public services.

Anyway, if any government attempted too much to interfere in the market, the rich would get huffy, and it would be the poor who suffered first. No government wanted to risk too much of that sort of thing.

The market, it now appears, had no such qualms. It was no doubt impervious to the joys of its time as a popular hero, which made it so much easier to bring the party crashing to an end. Job losses, service cuts, bankruptcies, negative equity and dinner ladies apparently entombing themselves in freezers over their £400 credit card bills – the impact on real people in the real economy is happening already, and all British government intervention has got to show for it so far is, bizarrely, West Ham Football Club and Hamleys.

Now economists squabble over whether the coming "correction" will be a recession or a depression, and non-specialist commentators of a dystopian bent wonder whether we are entering a downturn that will see us fighting in the streets for a rusty tin of skipjack tuna, rather than simply surveying our ruined pensions and despairing. Actually, the bankers of the past 30 years have behaved no differently to the unions of the 30 years before, starting out with grand intentions, then letting hubris get the better of their sense of proportion. What never changes is that ordinary people bear the brunt when it all goes belly-up. At least this time around one can choose the philosophical course, and acknowledge that it is better for the economy to overheat, than for the planet to – whether you subscribe to the idea that weird and incomprehensible market wisdom has brought us here, or you don't.