With Obama having now signed the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill into law, it’s worth pausing for a moment or two to wonder what, exactly, might have been the point.  For most of us out here in the country at large, the main thing that we want from this bill (ignoring, for a moment, that most of us don’t want this bill) is to know that the economy is never again going to go into a tailspin the way it did in 2008.  Even though nobody knows how the law works, we can at least be sure that it will prevent another economic breakdown.  Indeed, thousands of pages should be more than enough to ensure that another economic crisis won’t ever come up again.  The best news is, we’ll find out if it worked as soon as another crisis happens.

Fortunately, it seems that the next crisis may not be too long in coming.  Though nobody can predict a crisis with certainty, it does appear that the country is on a dangerous ledge.  Even Dodd says so.  But with the bill in place, we can at least be secure in the knowledge that we will be able to find out, through the course of the crisis, how well law prevents the next crisis from occurring.

If that seemed like it was worded awkwardly, it’s because the concept itself is awkward.  According to Dodd, we can only know how well the bill works when the next crisis hits.  But the supposed point of the bill is to prevent another economic crisis from ever occurring.  The tautology is fascinating, because between Dodd and Obama, we know for a fact that the only thing this bill can do is fail.

Of course, the open secret about te bill is the fact that it has nothing to do with actually preventing another crisis. In truth, Obama and Dodd are probably looking forward to another crisis, in hope of using their new toolkit to extend their stranglehold over American business.

But for ordinary Americans, the key measure of success won’t be whether the government can successfully wind down a bank that’s “too big to fail.” Success to us means having jobs, having an accurate value for our homes and financial investments, having money left after taxes to put in the bank, and having a bank left to put our money into. Nothing in the bill addresses any of those concerns.

Once again, the government has (willfully) missed the point.