Markets Do Not Build Themselves
In 1991, Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader of China, boarded a train and traveled south. He was eighty-seven years old, retired from formal power, and his country was at a crossroads. The reforms he had launched in 1978 — allowing farmers to sell surplus crops at market prices, opening coastal cities to foreign investment — had lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. But conservatives in the Communist Party were pushing back. The collapse of the Soviet Union had terrified them. Markets, they argued, were capitalism. And capitalism was the enemy.
Deng's answer was characteristically blunt. "It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white," he had said years earlier, "as long as it catches mice." On this southern tour, he went further. He visited Shenzhen, the special economic zone that had transformed from a fishing village into a booming city of factories and skyscrapers in just over a decade. He pointed to it and said, effectively: Look. This works. Build more of it.
But here is the part of the story that most people miss. Shenzhen did not emerge from thin air because someone simply declared "let there be markets." The Chinese state built Shenzhen. It drew the zone's boundaries. It laid the roads, installed the power lines, built the port. It wrote the special laws that applied inside the zone — different tax rates, different labor rules, different customs regulations than the rest of China. It invited specific foreign companies to invest, negotiated the terms, and provided the land. It trained workers, built housing for migrants, and created courts to resolve business disputes.
The market in Shenzhen was not free. It was constructed. Deliberately, carefully, and by the state.
This chapter is about a truth that is so obvious it is almost invisible: markets do not build themselves. Every market you have ever visited — from the vegetable vendor at the corner to the New York Stock Exchange — exists because someone built the infrastructure, wrote the rules, and enforced them. The question is never "market or government." The question is always: what kind of market, built by what kind of government, for whose benefit?
Look Around You
Think about the last time you bought something — anything. A cup of tea, a bus ticket, groceries from a shop. Now trace backwards. How did you pay? With currency guaranteed by a government. How did the goods reach the shop? On roads built or maintained by the state. How do you know the rice is not adulterated? Because there are food safety standards, however imperfectly enforced. How do you know the shopkeeper cannot simply steal your money? Because there are laws, and courts, and police. Every single transaction you make rests on a foundation built by collective action — usually through government.
The Invisible Floor Beneath Every Market
Walk into any mandi in India — say, the Azadpur Mandi in Delhi, one of the largest wholesale fruit and vegetable markets in Asia. The noise is extraordinary. Thousands of traders shouting prices, porters carrying impossible loads on their heads, trucks backing in and out, buyers examining crates of tomatoes and cauliflowers with the focused intensity of jewelers appraising diamonds.
It looks like pure, spontaneous commerce. A beautiful chaos of buying and selling, driven by nothing but supply and demand.
Now look again. Look at what you don't see.
You don't see the road that brought the trucks from Punjab and Karnataka. That road was built by the government. You don't see the weighing scales being checked — but someone calibrated them, and someone enforces the standards. You don't see the legal system that ensures contracts between traders are honored. You don't see the banking system that allows payments to be transferred across states. You don't see the police who ensure the market is not taken over by armed gangs. You don't see the municipal water supply, the electricity, the drainage.
All of this is infrastructure. Not just physical infrastructure — roads, bridges, electricity — but institutional infrastructure: laws, courts, standards, regulations, enforcement mechanisms. Without this invisible floor, the market could not exist.
This is not a theoretical point. We can see exactly what happens when the floor disappears.
When Markets Have No Floor
In Somalia, between 1991 and 2012, there was no functioning central government. The state collapsed after the fall of dictator Siad Barre, and the country descended into clan-based warfare. There were no courts, no police, no regulatory agencies, no central bank.
Markets still existed. Somalis are entrepreneurial people, and they continued to buy and sell. The mobile money system M-Pesa actually thrived there. But without the institutional floor, something predictable happened: markets worked only where personal relationships and clan networks could substitute for state institutions. If you knew the other trader, if you belonged to the same clan, if your families had ties going back generations — you could do business. Trust was personal, not institutional.
For everyone else, commerce was dangerous. There were no contracts that could be enforced. There was no recourse if someone cheated you. Goods were seized at checkpoints by armed militias who demanded payment for "security." The cost of doing business was enormous — not because of taxes or regulations, but because of the absence of them.
"The market is not just an economic institution. It is a legal one. Without courts to enforce contracts, without police to prevent theft, without standards to ensure quality — what you have is not a market. It is a jungle." — Hernando de Soto
The Somali experience is an extreme case. But look at the difference between states within India. Why is it easier to do business in Gujarat or Tamil Nadu than in Bihar or Jharkhand? The people are equally capable, equally hardworking. The difference is largely institutional: better roads, more reliable electricity, faster courts, clearer land records, less harassment by petty officials. The infrastructure of the market — physical and institutional — varies enormously, and so do economic outcomes.
What Actually Happened
The World Bank's "Doing Business" reports, published from 2003 to 2020, ranked countries by how easy it was to start a business, register property, enforce contracts, and resolve insolvency. India's rank improved from 142nd in 2014 to 63rd in 2020, largely because of targeted reforms in specific areas — online company registration, reduced time for electricity connections, faster contract enforcement in Delhi and Mumbai. But the reports also revealed a deep truth: the countries at the top — Singapore, New Zealand, Denmark, South Korea — were not countries with no government involvement in markets. They were countries where government involvement was efficient, transparent, and purposeful. The "freest" markets in the world were, paradoxically, the most deliberately constructed ones.
Karl Polanyi and the Great Deception
In 1944, a Hungarian-born scholar named Karl Polanyi published a book called The Great Transformation. It is one of the most important books about economics ever written, and hardly anyone outside academia has heard of it.
Polanyi's argument was devastatingly simple. The idea that markets are natural — that they spring up spontaneously whenever people are left alone — is a myth. Historically, markets have always been embedded in society. They were part of the social fabric, governed by customs, norms, religious rules, and political authority. The idea of a "self-regulating market" — one that operates independently of society, following only its own internal logic of supply and demand — was an invention of the nineteenth century. And it was an invention that required enormous state power to create.
Think about that. The "free market," far from being the natural state of human affairs, was something that had to be forcibly imposed. In England, where industrial capitalism first emerged, the state had to:
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Enclose the commons: For centuries, English villagers had shared common land for grazing, gathering firewood, and growing food. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, Parliament passed thousands of Enclosure Acts, converting this shared land into private property. This was not a natural process. It was legislation, enforced by law and often by violence. Villagers who resisted were arrested or evicted.
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Create a labor market: Before capitalism, most people worked on the land or in household workshops. They were not "workers" selling their labor for wages. To create a labor market, the state had to first destroy the old systems of support — the commons, the parish relief, the guild protections — so that people had no choice but to sell their labor. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 deliberately made life so miserable for the poor that they would be forced to accept factory work.
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Establish property rights: The concept of absolute private property — land that you can buy, sell, fence off, and exclude others from — is not natural. It is a legal construction. It required land surveys, title deeds, registries, courts, and enforcement. All of these are state functions.
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Create money and banking: The Bank of England, founded in 1694, was a state-created institution. The gold standard, which governed international trade for over a century, was maintained by central banks and government policy. Money itself is a creature of the state.
Polanyi's insight was profound: the "free market" was the most ambitious government project in human history. It required more state intervention, more legislation, more policing, and more institutional engineering than any previous economic system. The idea that it was the result of government "getting out of the way" was, in his words, "the great deception."
"The road to the free market was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous, centrally organized and controlled interventionism." — Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation
How the British State Built Capitalism
Let us stay with England for a moment, because it is the founding case — the place where industrial capitalism first emerged, and the place that most clearly shows how states build markets.
The story usually goes like this: clever English inventors created new machines, entrepreneurial businessmen built factories, and the invisible hand of the market did the rest. Government stayed out of the way, and prosperity followed.
Almost none of this is true.
The British state was deeply involved at every stage. Consider:
The Royal Navy protected trade routes. Britain's global commerce depended entirely on naval supremacy. The state built and maintained the largest navy in the world, at enormous expense, specifically to protect the trade routes that brought raw materials in and sent manufactured goods out. The cotton that fed Lancashire's mills came from India, Egypt, and the American South. The ships that carried it were protected by government-funded warships. This was not "free trade." It was state-subsidized trade, backed by military force.
Patent law protected inventors. The Statute of Monopolies (1624) and subsequent patent legislation gave inventors a temporary monopoly on their inventions. Without this legal protection — created and enforced by the state — there would have been little incentive to invest in new machines. James Watt's steam engine was protected by a patent that Watt vigorously enforced, through government courts, against anyone who tried to copy it.
Tariffs protected infant industries. For over a century before Britain became the world's factory, the British government used tariffs and import bans to protect domestic manufacturing. The Calico Acts of 1700 and 1721 banned the import of Indian cotton textiles — which were then superior to British ones — specifically to give British manufacturers time to develop their own industry. Britain preached free trade only after it had already won the game.
The legal system enforced contracts. The entire system of commercial law — contract enforcement, bankruptcy procedures, company incorporation — was created by the state, through Parliament and the courts. Without it, the complex web of relationships that makes industrial capitalism possible — between investors and managers, suppliers and manufacturers, employers and workers — could not have existed.
The lesson is not that the state is always right or that government intervention always works. It is that the market economy we take for granted was built, deliberately and painstakingly, by state action. The question was never whether the government should be involved. It was how.
INFRASTRUCTURE THAT MAKES MARKETS POSSIBLE
PHYSICAL INSTITUTIONAL
┌───────────────────┐ ┌───────────────────┐
│ Roads & Highways │ │ Property Rights │
│ Railways │ │ Contract Law │
│ Ports & Airports │ │ Courts & Justice │
│ Electricity Grid │ │ Banking System │
│ Telecom Networks │ │ Currency & Money │
│ Water & Sanitation│ │ Standards/Weights │
│ Cold Storage │ │ Company Law │
│ Warehouses │ │ Patent/Copyright │
└─────────┬─────────┘ └─────────┬─────────┘
│ │
└──────────┐ ┌────────────────┘
│ │
v v
┌─────────────────────┐
│ FUNCTIONING │
│ MARKET │
│ │
│ Buyers & Sellers │
│ meet, transact, │
│ and trust the │
│ system enough to │
│ do it again │
│ tomorrow. │
└─────────────────────┘
│
│
┌─────────────────────┐
│ SOCIAL FABRIC │
│ │
│ Trust, norms, │
│ education, health, │
│ shared language, │
│ political │
│ stability │
└─────────────────────┘
Remove any layer, and the market
becomes less efficient — or collapses entirely.
Think About It
Can you name three things the government provides that make it possible for you to buy vegetables from your neighborhood shop? Now imagine those three things disappeared. What would change? Would the shop still exist? Would you still trust the transaction?
The Tigers Who Built Their Markets
If Britain's story shows how state power created the conditions for capitalism two centuries ago, the stories of Singapore, South Korea, and China show how it was done in our own time.
Singapore: The Market as a Government Project
When Singapore became independent in 1965, it was a tiny island with no natural resources, no hinterland, and no obvious reason to exist as an economy. Its population of two million had no industry, limited education, and uncertain prospects. The British had used it as a trading post and naval base. Now the British were leaving.
Lee Kuan Yew, the country's founding prime minister, did something remarkable. He built a market — but not by getting out of the way. He built it by getting very much in the way.
The government created the Economic Development Board, which actively recruited multinational corporations, offering them tax breaks, cheap land, trained workers, and excellent infrastructure. But there were conditions. Companies were expected to train local workers, transfer technology, and gradually increase the local content of their operations.
The government built industrial estates — fully serviced, with roads, power, water, and telecommunications. It built public housing, eventually housing over 80 percent of the population in government-built apartments. It created a compulsory savings scheme — the Central Provident Fund — that forced workers to save a portion of their wages, providing a pool of domestic capital for investment.
It invested massively in education, transforming a population with limited skills into one of the most educated workforces in the world. It built one of the world's best ports and airports. It created a legal system known for efficiency and predictability. It eliminated corruption so thoroughly that Singapore consistently ranks among the least corrupt countries on earth.
The result? One of the richest countries in the world, with per capita income exceeding that of most Western nations. A market economy — but one built from scratch by an exceptionally capable state.
South Korea: From Rice Paddies to Semiconductors
In 1961, South Korea was poorer than most sub-Saharan African countries. Its per capita income was comparable to that of Sudan. It had been devastated by the Korean War and had few natural resources. Nobody expected it to become an industrial powerhouse.
The military government of Park Chung-hee, which took power in a coup that year, embarked on a strategy of state-led industrialization that would transform the country beyond recognition.
The government did not simply create "good conditions" for markets. It directed the economy with extraordinary precision. It identified industries that Korea should develop — first textiles and wigs, then steel and ships, then electronics and automobiles. It channeled cheap credit from state-controlled banks to chosen companies — the chaebol — like Samsung, Hyundai, LG, and Daewoo. Companies that met export targets were rewarded. Those that failed were punished, sometimes brutally — their credit lines cut off, their licenses revoked.
The state protected these infant industries with high tariffs, keeping out foreign competition until domestic companies were strong enough to compete. It invested in education on a massive scale. It built highways, ports, and industrial zones. It controlled the financial system, directing savings toward productive investment rather than speculation.
Was this a "free market"? By any textbook definition, no. The government picked winners, subsidized favored companies, restricted imports, controlled banks, and directed investment. And yet it produced one of the greatest economic transformations in human history. In sixty years, South Korea went from a war-torn agricultural country to the world's twelfth-largest economy, home to globally dominant companies in semiconductors, automobiles, steel, shipbuilding, and electronics.
"All the now-developed countries, including Britain and the US, used activist economic policies when they themselves were developing countries. What they are doing in recommending free-market policies to developing countries is like pulling away the ladder they used to climb up." — Ha-Joon Chang
China: The Greatest Market-Building Project in History
China's story dwarfs all others in scale. After Deng Xiaoping's reforms beginning in 1978, the Chinese state built a market economy of 1.4 billion people — the largest economic transformation ever attempted.
But it was never a "free" market. The state owned the land. The state controlled the banking system. The state chose which sectors to develop, which technologies to pursue, which regions to open first. It created special economic zones — Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou, Xiamen — with different rules from the rest of the country, testing market mechanisms before rolling them out nationally.
When China wanted to build an automobile industry, it did not simply open its market to Toyota and Volkswagen. It required foreign automakers to form joint ventures with Chinese state-owned companies, transferring technology and know-how. When it wanted to develop solar panel manufacturing, it provided massive subsidies, cheap land, and below-market electricity to Chinese manufacturers, enabling them to undercut global competitors. When it wanted to lead in electric vehicles, it offered subsidies to domestic manufacturers and buyers while making it harder for foreign competitors.
Critics call this unfair. They are probably right. But the result is undeniable. China lifted over 800 million people out of extreme poverty. It became the world's largest manufacturer, its largest exporter, and — by purchasing power parity — its largest economy. This was not the invisible hand of the market. This was the very visible hand of the state, building a market on a scale never before seen.
What Actually Happened
Between 1978 and 2023, China's GDP per capita (in constant dollars) increased roughly thirtyfold. Manufacturing output grew from less than 5 percent of the global total to nearly 30 percent. Life expectancy rose from 66 to 78 years. Literacy went from roughly 65 percent to over 97 percent. Yet China never adopted the "free market" model recommended by Western economists. It maintained state ownership of banks, land, and key enterprises. It controlled capital flows, managed its currency, and directed industrial policy. The most successful market-building project in history was, in many ways, the least "free."
The Myth of the Self-Regulating Market
There is a story that free-market advocates love to tell. It goes like this: if you simply remove government interference — cut regulations, lower taxes, privatize state-owned companies, open borders to trade — the market will naturally organize itself to produce the best outcomes for everyone. Government is the problem. The market is the solution.
This story is powerful. It is elegant. And it is dangerously incomplete.
We have already seen that every functioning market in history was built on a foundation of state-created infrastructure and institutions. But the myth goes deeper. It suggests that markets, once created, can regulate themselves — that competition and price signals are sufficient to prevent abuse, protect consumers, and ensure fair outcomes.
The evidence says otherwise.
Consider the 2008 global financial crisis. The deregulation of American financial markets in the 1990s and 2000s — removing restrictions on what banks could do, allowing complex financial instruments to be traded without oversight, weakening enforcement agencies — was explicitly based on the belief that markets would regulate themselves. Bankers, the theory went, would not take excessive risks because the market would punish them. Investors would monitor banks because their own money was at stake.
What actually happened was that banks took enormous risks, invented financial products so complex that even their own executives did not understand them, and when the system collapsed, it took the entire global economy down with it. Millions of people lost their homes, their jobs, their savings. The government — the same government that had been told to stay out of the way — had to step in with trillions of dollars in bailouts to prevent a complete economic collapse.
The self-regulating market did not self-regulate. It self-destructed.
"Anyone who believes that the market is self-regulating has not studied the history of markets." — Joseph Stiglitz
Market Economy vs. Market Society
There is a distinction that matters enormously, though it is rarely made explicit. There is a difference between a market economy and a market society.
A market economy is a tool. It is a way of organizing the production and distribution of goods and services using prices, competition, and voluntary exchange. As a tool, it has enormous advantages — it processes information efficiently, it rewards innovation, it gives consumers choices, it allocates resources in ways that central planners often cannot match.
A market society is something different. It is what you get when the logic of the market — buying, selling, competing, maximizing — extends beyond the economy into every aspect of life. When healthcare is sold to the highest bidder. When education is a commodity. When political influence is bought and sold. When human relationships are evaluated in terms of their market value. When everything has a price and nothing has a value.
The American philosopher Michael Sandel posed this distinction sharply: "We have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. The difference is this: a market economy is a tool — a valuable and effective tool — for organizing productive activity. A market society is a place where everything is up for sale."
In a market economy, you might use market mechanisms to allocate smartphones and motorcycles — goods where competition and consumer choice work well. But you would not necessarily use market mechanisms to allocate kidneys, or justice, or the right to pollute, or a child's access to education. Some things, most societies have decided, should not be for sale.
The danger is not markets themselves. The danger is the uncritical expansion of market logic into domains where it does not belong. When we allow the market to determine who gets healthcare and who doesn't, who gets a good education and who doesn't, who has access to clean air and who breathes pollution — we have crossed a line from a market economy to a market society. And in a market society, outcomes are determined not by what is right or fair or humane, but by what is profitable.
"We need to ask where markets serve the public good and where they don't belong." — Michael Sandel
MARKET ECONOMY vs. MARKET SOCIETY
MARKET ECONOMY (Tool) MARKET SOCIETY (Ideology)
┌─────────────────────┐ ┌─────────────────────┐
│ │ │ │
│ Markets allocate │ │ Markets allocate │
│ GOODS & SERVICES │ │ EVERYTHING │
│ │ │ │
│ - Consumer goods │ │ - Healthcare │
│ - Services │ │ - Education │
│ - Labor │ │ - Justice │
│ - Capital │ │ - Political access │
│ │ │ - Human organs │
│ Government handles:│ │ - Clean air/water │
│ - Public goods │ │ - Citizenship │
│ - Justice │ │ │
│ - Healthcare │ │ "Everything has │
│ - Education │ │ a price." │
│ - Environment │ │ │
│ │ │ │
│ "Markets are a │ │ "The market IS │
│ useful servant." │ │ the master." │
└─────────────────────┘ └─────────────────────┘
Think About It
Should the following things be allocated by market mechanisms (whoever can pay the most gets them) or by some other principle? Why?
- A kidney for transplant
- A seat at a public university
- Clean drinking water
- A ticket to a cricket match
- The right to emit carbon dioxide
- A vote in an election
Notice how your answer changes depending on the item. What principle are you using to draw the line?
India's Own Market-Building Story
India's relationship with markets has been complex and conflicted. After independence in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru and the first generation of Indian leaders were deeply skeptical of unregulated markets — and for good reason. They had seen how "free" markets under British rule had deindustrialized India, drained its wealth, and left the country impoverished. The market, as India experienced it under colonialism, was an instrument of extraction, not prosperity.
So independent India chose a different path. The state would guide the economy. The Planning Commission would set priorities. The government would own key industries — steel, coal, railways, banking, telecommunications. Private enterprise was allowed but heavily regulated through a complex system of licenses and permits that came to be known as the License Raj.
This system had real achievements. India built a diversified industrial base, established world-class scientific institutions, achieved self-sufficiency in food production through the Green Revolution, and created a stable, if slow-growing, economy. It also had serious problems: inefficiency, corruption, shortage, and a growth rate so low — about 3.5 percent per year, derisively called the "Hindu rate of growth" — that it could barely keep pace with population increase.
In 1991, facing a balance-of-payments crisis, India changed course. The government, under Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, dismantled much of the License Raj. It reduced tariffs, opened the economy to foreign investment, deregulated industries, and allowed market forces a much greater role.
But — and this is the crucial point — the state did not disappear. It reformed its role. The government continued to build highways through the Golden Quadrilateral project. It created new regulatory institutions — SEBI for stock markets, TRAI for telecommunications. It expanded the banking system, built digital infrastructure through Aadhaar and UPI, and invested in education and healthcare, however inadequately.
India's economic growth since 1991 — averaging around 6 to 7 percent annually, making it one of the fastest-growing major economies in the world — was not the result of the state getting out of the way. It was the result of the state changing what it did. Less licensing, more infrastructure. Less directing private companies, more creating the conditions for them to compete. Less controlling prices, more building the systems that allow prices to work.
The market did not build itself. The state rebuilt the market.
Rules, and Who Makes Them
There is one more dimension to this story that we must not ignore. Every market is shaped by rules. And rules are made by people with power.
When we say "free market," we usually mean a market free from certain kinds of government intervention — price controls, licensing requirements, trade barriers. But no market is free from rules. Even the most "deregulated" market has rules about property rights, contract enforcement, currency, taxation, and what is legal to buy and sell.
The question is: who writes those rules? And in whose interest?
When the rules are written primarily by large corporations and wealthy individuals — through lobbying, campaign contributions, or outright corruption — markets tend to produce outcomes that favor the wealthy. When the rules are written through democratic processes, with genuine representation of workers, consumers, and the poor, markets tend to produce more broadly shared prosperity.
This is not a left-wing or right-wing point. It is a historical observation. The most prosperous and equal societies in human history — the Nordic countries, postwar Western Europe, East Asian developmental states — all had highly regulated markets with strong state involvement. The most unequal and unstable societies often had markets where rules were written by and for the powerful.
The next time someone tells you that the government should "let the market work," ask a simple question: whose rules? Because the market always works — the only question is for whom.
"There is no such thing as a free market. Every market has rules and boundaries that restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them." — Ha-Joon Chang
The Bigger Picture
We began in Shenzhen, watching a fishing village become a megacity because a government decided to build a market from scratch. We traveled to Azadpur Mandi, where the visible chaos of commerce rests on invisible foundations of roads, laws, and institutions. We walked through the history of England's enclosures, South Korea's chaebol, Singapore's public housing, and India's own journey from License Raj to liberalization.
What have we learned?
First, that markets are not natural phenomena like weather or tides. They are human creations, built on infrastructure that someone had to plan, fund, and maintain. Every road, every court, every standard, every law that makes commerce possible is a public good — something the market itself cannot provide, because no individual has the incentive to provide it.
Second, that the most successful market economies in history — from nineteenth-century Britain to twenty-first-century China — were built by active, capable states. Not states that controlled everything, but states that built the foundations and wrote the rules. The debate between "state" and "market" is a false choice. The real question is how they work together.
Third, that there is a crucial difference between a market economy and a market society. Markets are powerful tools for organizing production and exchange. But when market logic expands to encompass everything — healthcare, education, justice, human dignity — something vital is lost. The question is not whether to use markets, but where to draw the line.
And fourth, that rules matter. Every market operates within a framework of rules, and those rules determine who benefits and who is left behind. The freedom of the market is always freedom within constraints. The only question is who sets the constraints and for what purpose.
Polanyi warned, eighty years ago, that the attempt to create a self-regulating market — a market disembedded from society — would inevitably provoke a backlash. People would resist being treated as mere inputs into an economic machine. They would demand protection — from the state, from their communities, from whatever institutions could shield them from the market's destructive potential.
He was right. Every major political movement of the past century — from the welfare state to fascism, from trade unionism to populist nationalism — can be understood, at least in part, as a response to the disruptions caused by unregulated markets.
The lesson is not that markets are bad. It is that markets are powerful, and powerful things need to be governed. A market without rules is not freedom. It is the freedom of the strong to exploit the weak. A market with good rules — fair, transparent, democratically determined — is one of the greatest tools humanity has ever created.
But tools do not build themselves. Someone has to pick them up, shape them, and put them to work. That someone, in the end, is us — as citizens, as voters, as members of a society that has the power to decide what kind of economy we want to live in.
"The invisible hand of the market works only in the context of the visible hand of the state." — Dani Rodrik