I’ve recently heard some conversation trying to sully or tarnish the idea of openness by associating it with socialism. (Of course, if there’s anything you don’t like in the US today the standard response is to label it “socialist,” despite the fact that many labelers can neither define nor spell the term properly.) However, from my perspective some of the most important forms of openness are simply about obeying one of the standard laws of capitalism: if I pay for a good or service, I am entitled to the good or service. Could the market (or society) survive if we didn’t obey this rule?

David WielyThe Twice-Paid Paradox

Mr. Wiley is one of the good guys whose ideas we can…

Not to get all technical, but most of the time the capitalist market is almost shockingly reified, even by academics who you think would know better. The market, at best a rough description of a myriad of social and economic forces, seems to be constantly doing things that we just can’t do much about. Sometimes it’s explicit and almost religious in tone– the market is omnipotent and infallible– and sometimes its implicit.

There’s rarely any larger agency behind the decimation of the U.S. automobile industry, for example; it’s simply the unions and foreign competition. (More recently, however, poor management is sometimes blamed.) It didn’t just happen, though, by magic; the industry was destroyed by short term thinking and by…