Must-Read: : Karl Polanyi for President: “Today, Polanyian arguments are once again in the air…
…Polanyi’s work… show[s] that markets are planned everywhere they exist… always the result of the state…. A pure free-market society is a utopian project, and impossible to realize, because people will resist the process of being turned into commodities. In fact, he calls labor a ‘fictitious commodity,’ along with land and money….
The drive for laissez-faire inevitably produces a protective countermovement that insists on shelter from the damaging effects of the market…. If markets are interfering with other social priorities (like democracy, for example), or producing bad outcomes, you can change the rules that govern what parts of society operate with what kinds of markets…