I think you misunderstand the article, the term comes from Carlyle rejecting the free market as a philosophical principle, not some efficiency analysis. And in fact his essay was a defense of plantation owners whose businesses were failing because they had just lost access to extremely efficient slave labor thanks to inconvenient regulations.<p>If the economy were a little more global back then, those plantation owners should have moved their businesses to different, more slavery&#x2F;business-friendly countries rather than adapt to the new human rights the workers had been given, no?