A closer look
Libertarians love pretending the free market is a natural human state, but Karl Polanyi argued it's actually a violent, artificial construction ruthlessly enforced by the state. He observed that throughout history, markets were deeply "embedded" in social ties and reciprocity. Forcing a society into a pure, unregulated market economy strips away those human relationships and reduces living people to mere commodities. Left to its own devices, Polanyi warned, this utopian free-market obsession will inevitably rip society entirely apart.
