"Hayek translated moral and political problems into an economic idiom. What we need now, I would argue, is a way to uninstall or reverse that translation. Karl Marx attempted just such a project, but his answers were elusive. In a fascinating but little-known 1927 essay, “On Freedom,” Karl Polanyi also attempted such a project, giving us a stylized rendition of what it would mean for a political collective, rather than a firm or a consumer, to make an economic decision—not in the marketplace, where price helps determine our decisions, but in a deliberative assembly, where other considerations are at play. One part of the assembly, representing the interests of the collective, will want to make an investment in a long-term good; healthcare was the example Polanyi chose. Another part of the assembly, representing the workers who would have to make the specific sacrifices for that good, resists that decision. What to do? Argue it out, says Polanyi. Whatever is the final decision, it will be “a direct, internal choice, for here ideals within people are confronted with their costs; here everyone has to decide what his ideals are worth to him.” Notice that Polanyi does not presume any agreement about moral and political ends, as Hayek claimed socialists must. Notice how insistent he is that decisions about production must confront the question of costs. Like Hayek, Polanyi is attuned to the materiality of moral choice, only he believes the question of costs and constraints is best mediated through moral and political arguments in the public square."