When I was in college, the campus Marxist shared a workspace — and community refrigerator — with several of his more free-market-minded colleagues. On opening the fridge for his half-and-half one morning, a professor of logic chuckled to see a note attached to the brown-bag lunch of his socialist neighbour.

“Property of J.R.” it read. The story had made the rounds to every political science class by noon. No community property for this socialist.

“J.R.” offered a fitting proof that free markets and the property rights that go with them are so alluring that even avowed Marxists sometimes can’t resist them — especially if they want to eat lunch. And no one has made the case for the pursuit of self-interest, the division of labour and freedom of trade better than Adam Smith, the 18th-century thinker who drew the blueprint for free-market economies.

Enter the brainy satirist P.J. O’Rourke to help us slog through Smith’s writing, which O’Rourke accurately describes as voluminous and dense even by 18th-century standards. O’Rourke’s “On ‘The Wealth of Nations’,” a more accessible version of Smith’s ideas, is the first in a series of cheat-sheet versions of “Books That Changed the World” planned by Atlantic Monthly Press.

O’Rourke is, as always, readable and funny, and the latter quality is at once the best and worst thing about his book.

Happily for the reader, he knows how to turn complex to simple and archaic to contemporary. Banking is just a way to store “your toil and trouble,” he writes, seizing on some Smithian examples about the economic benefits of hunting beavers:

“Absent some system of banking, you have to pile the beavers under your bed where they’re no use to anyone. And they stink. Banking allows you to rent the beavers to me.”

Sometimes, though, his humour goes too far. Progressive taxation, he writes, under which the rich pay more in proportion to what they make than the poor, is a Smith idea that only works “if the government makes the poor knock it off with the graffiti and turn down the rap music”.

In the very free market of internet dating services, O’Rourke just might get paired with that noted free-market humanitarian Ann Coulter.

As it turns out, O’Rourke’s subject — whom he clearly admires — was not just a nice guy but a nice guy who applied his morals to his theories. His ethics would have looked bizarre to some of today’s executives: When he had to cut short a semester of teaching at Glasgow University, he tried to return the tuition money to his students. When he had savings, he’d give a big chunk to charity.

He was all for letting free markets do their thing. But if you’re a fat cat hoping to learn that Smith had high regard for your ilk, forget it. He commented that landlords “love to reap where they never sowed” and that merchants complain about the evils of high wages even as they keep their traps shut about high profits.

To get the most out of “On ‘The Wealth of Nations’,” try starting with Chapter 13, in which O’Rourke does a great job of explaining who Smith was and why he mattered.

O’Rourke chose to write about Smith’s ideas before writing about Smith himself in part because Smith lived in a time when ideas, not people, mattered most. But it doesn’t hurt to have a little context before diving into his intellectual contributions.

O’Rourke likes his subject, but he doesn’t plaster him with indiscriminate accolades. Smith, for example, didn’t come close to predicting the enormity of the Industrial Revolution, and the author calls him on that — although “even when he was wrong he was smarter than other people”.

Smart and timeless. Have fun reading the hilarious section on world trade. To make his point that an international “current account deficit” is not comparable to a private debt, O’Rourke quips, “Hu Jintao is not going to show up at my door threatening to repossess my DVD player because he has a 50-dollar bill that I owe on.”

Would that O’Rourke had added a little something about the Great Border Threat. How on earth did he miss taking a swipe at Lou Dobbs?

[bul] “On ‘The Wealth of Nations’” is published by Atlantic Monthly Press (256 pages, $21.95).

(Susan Antilla is a columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)