"Real market societies need the state to play an active role in managing markets, and that role requires political decision making; it cannot be reduced to some kind of technical or administrative function. When the state policies move in the direction of disembedding through placing greater reliance on market self-regulation, ordinary people are forced to bear higher costs. Workers and their families are made more vulnerable to unemployment, farmers are exposed to greater competition from imports, and both groups are required to get by with reduced entitlements to assistance. It often takes greater state efforts to assure that these groups will bear these increased costs without engaging in disruptive political actions. This is part of what Polanyi means by his claim that “laissez-faire was planned”; it requires statecraft and repression to impose the logic of the market and its attendant risks on ordinary people."
Source: Just started reading Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. This is from the introduction by Fred Block.