Within capitalism, a sterile economy emerges, which takes away investment from the productive economy, resulting in deficient employment generating spending and underemployment. States react with prosthetics, i.e., artificial transfers to the productive economy. These in turn are financed by external violence, protectionism, taxation, public and private indebtedness and - increasingly - by money creation. What happens when these methods will be exhausted? Gerhard H. Waechter examines major theoretical and historical lines of the subject using Quesnay, Sismondi, Malthus, Marx, Keynes and others.