The free market requires constant state interventionism to be established and maintained

Evidence

[T]he road to the free market was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous, centrally organized and controlled interventionism… . Administrators had to be constantly on the watch to ensure the free working of the system. Thus even those who wished most ardently to free the state from all unnecessary duties, and whose whole philosophy demanded the restriction of state activities, could not but entrust the state with new powers, organs and instruments required for the establishment of laissez faire. (1957, 140) By the later 1980s, when the MPS members began to smell the tang of victory, they felt free to internally discuss an irony that they could not freely admit out at the nether layers of their Russian Doll: Among our members, there are some who are able to imagine a viable society without a state. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2137

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the infrastructure argument in ‘Grafting and Growth’: the free market is itself an infrastructure requiring continuous construction and maintenance, not a natural given.
• XREF: The classic Polanyi paradox that laissez faire was planned; connects to the reader’s broader sociology-of-deregulation literature. — connects to: Postwar liberal revivalists framed state intervention as a neutral arbiter protecting market rules — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 194; Finance requires the state to regulate markets and police its own excesses — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 504; The market must be actively constituted by political intervention, not discovered — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 1852 (+12 more)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberal rhetoric evokes free markets while quietly relying on a strong state #corroborates (0.95) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 26
• Neoliberalism differs from laissez-faire liberalism by using state intervention to create competition #expands (0.93)
• Austerity capitalism means more state intervention, not less, to fortify the market #corroborates (0.90) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 151
• Ordoliberalism makes state policy the guardian of fragile market mechanisms #exemplifies (0.85) — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 1258
• State intervention in capitalism grows from saver flight toward guaranteed returns #expands (0.82)
• Neoliberal freedom amounts to submission to market sovereignty enforced by price fluctuations #expands (0.75)
• Market ideology functions to repress freedom rather than secure it #complicates (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 600
• State intervention made capitalist exploitation political and thereby threatened capitalism itself #qualifies (0.70) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 173