“The utopian springs of the dogma of laissez-faire are but incompletely understood as long as they are viewed separately. The three tenets—competitive labor market, automatic gold standard, and international free trade—formed one whole. The sacrifices involved in achieving any one of them were useless, if not worse, unless the other two were equally secured. It was everything or nothing.

Anybody could see that the gold standard, for instance, meant danger of deadly deflation and, maybe, of fatal monetary stringency in a panic. The manufacturer could, therefore, hope to hold his own only if he was assured of an increasing scale of production at remunerative prices (in other words, only if wages fell at least in proportion to the general fall in prices, so as to allow the exploitation of an ever- expanding world market). Thus the Anti-Corn Law Bill of 1846 was the corollary of Peel’s Bank Act of 1844, and both assumed a laboring class which, since the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, was forced to give its best under the threat of hunger, so that wages were regulated by the price of grain. The three great measures formed a coherent whole.”

—The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi