FROM John Gray’s False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism*:

The free market is a construction of state power. The idea that free markets and minimum government go together, which was part of the stock in trade of the New Right, is an inversion of truth. Since the natural tendency of society is to curb markets, free markets can only be created by the power of a centralized state. Free markets are creatures of strong government and cannot exist without them … It is well illustrated by the short history of 19th century laissez-faire. The free market was engineered in mid-Victorian England in exceptionally propitious circumstances. Unlike other European countries, England has long traditions of individualism. For centuries yeoman farmers were the basis of its economy. But only Parliament [in which most English people were unrepresented] using its power to amend or destroy property rights and create new ones — through Enclosure Acts in which much of the country’s common land was privatized — did an agrarian capitalism of large landed estates come into being … By the middle of the 19th century, through the enclosures, the Poor Laws and the repeal of the Corn Law, land, labour and bread were commodities like any other: the free market had become the central institution in the economy … By the First World War, markets had been largely re-regulated in the interests of public health and economic efficiency.

* John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (London: Granta Books 2nd revised edition 2009), p. 198. [As quoted by E. Michael Jones in Barren Metal: A History of Capitalism as the Conflict between Labor and Usury, Fidelity Press, 2014]

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