The countermove against economic liberalism and laissez-faire possessed all the unmistakable characteristics of a spontaneous reaction. At innumerabl… - Karl Polanyi

For Polanyi the deepest flaw in market liberalism is that it subordinates human purposes to the logic of an impersonal market mechanism.

The road to the free market was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous, centrally organized and controlled interventionism. To make Adam Smith's "simple and natural liberty" compatible with the needs of a human society was a most complicated affair.

The standard use of money is vital to the staple finance that accompanies large-scale storage economies. No assessment and collection of taxes, no budgeting and balancing of manorial households, no rational accountancy comprising a variety of goods is possible without a standard. Since it is not the number of things but their values that are here subjected to arithmetic, this operation requires the setting of rates relating the various staples to one another. Such figures, representing rates, are in effect available in most archaic societies. Whether by virtue of custom, statute, or proclamation, fixed equivalents designate the rate at which the necessities of life can be mutually substituted, one for another. It is only when prices develop in markets (i.e., relatively late) that money as a standard can be taken for granted, as it is today.