Enclosures have appropriately been called a revolution of the rich against the poor. The lords and nobles were upsetting the social order, breaking d… - Karl Polanyi

If it seems that we have unduly stressed "acquisition of goods from a distance" as the crucial factor in trade, it was done, inter alia, in order to work out more clearly the determinative role played by the acquisitive or import interest in the history of trade. It involves, as we saw, no less than the alternatives of peaceful versus forcible methods of satisfying that interest, alternatives that may affect the total structure of the state as well as its modes of acting in history.

Market economy implies a self-regulating system of markets; in slightly more technical terms, it is an economy directed by market prices and nothing but market prices. Such a system capable of organizing the whole of economic life without outside help or interference would certainly deserve to be called self-regulating. These rough indications should suffice to show the entirely unprecedented nature of such a venture in the history of the race.

But we also know that growth can bring enormous benefits to most segments in society, as it has in some of the more enlightened advanced industrial countries.