The first advocate of Open Source was none other than the patron saint of neoliberal economics: Adam Smith. Although Smith’s classic The Wealth of Nations has become the de-facto Bible of the neoliberal agenda, invoking Smith to justify cut-throat capitalism is nothing more than a distortion of his true philosophical beliefs.

According to Smith, the “invisible hand” of the free market, set into motion by rational self-interest, would result in a price that provides a fair return to land, labor, and capital invested, and produce a satisfactory outcome for buyers and sellers. His idealized model envisioned local economies and local markets as the mechanism for achieving an optimal allocation of resources.

Smith would have been horrified by the continual collusion between government and corporations that has become common place in our modern economy. Yet he would have recognized all of the tools which the corporation uses to subvert citizen democracy and government accountability: lobbying campaigns, political contributions, government subsidies, unfair trade agreements, sole-source contracts, military intervention…the list goes on. In Smith’s own words:

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

He was also critical of trade secrets, believing that they stifled competition, undermined free markets, and had the same inflationary effect on natural prices as monopolies. Adam Smith would have immediately recognized the equalizing value of the Free Software Movement, and would have applauded its philosophical underpinnings as very much in line with his own.

Moreover, he would be in full agreement with the call for Open Sourcing Appropriate Technology made here on.  As Smith himself wrote:

farmers are, to their great honor, of all people the least subject to the wretched spirit of monopoly… They have no secrets, such as those of the greater part of manufacturers, but are generally rather fond of communicating to their neighbors, and of extending as far as possible any new practice which they have found to be advantageous.

The Open Source movement has found an unlikely and compelling ally in Adam Smith. In picking apart neoliberal economics, we need but take the principles of freedom, turned upside down by the corporatocracy, and put them right side up again, where they belong.