Thesis
In this article by Stephen Martin Fritz & Denise Morel, trade is positioned as the catalyst for democracy. Commercialism breeds wealth, democracy, history.
Arguments
Trade can lead to tolerance
Example: as a merchant, your goal is to sell your products. As such, you would tolerate potential clients as long as you get to get money from them.
Historically, all democracies sprung like this - Greece, Rome.
Specialization can lead to equality in how we treat one another
Example: the waitress “serves” the carpenter while he is at the restaurant. The carpenter serves the waitress lady when he is doing his job for her; she is his client.
Social mobility also comes into effect in nations with high trade, when you are not bound by your family’s history in terms of specialization (e.g. the need following the same profession as your parents, working on the same farm etc.).
Freedom
Based on this article, freedom = having more choices. This is a narrow definition of freedom, since the palete of choices you have is also pre-determined.
Secondly, why is it liberating to pick 10 colors for your toothbrush instead of 2?
Death of democracy
What matters in democracies is not how broadly educated each individual is; what matters is how easily each person can specialize and trade with each other. Politics is not what matters most in our lives; production and trade are. The President doesn’t provide for our needs; supermarkets and stores do. So the average citizen might be allowed to select the next President of the United States; but nobody in his right mind would trust him to select the next district manager for Costco.
Turning again to history, we discover that democracies do not simply die; rather, democracies are murdered. They’re strangled when society changes its focus from production and trade in peace and prosperity to endless war and the redirection of industry to socially-destructive ends – ends which hinder varied production, and leave ever fewer choices available to citizens.
I am not sure how to feel about this approach.