The 18th and 19th centuries paradigm

"Mercantilist policies favored merchant exporters but hurt domestic manufacturers in the host countries as well as the colonies. Moreover, restricting the volume of domestic products that could be produced for the home market in order to keep export prices artificially high worked not only to the disadvantage of the domestic manufacturers, but also the rising middle class and urban working poor, who had to contend with higher prices for domestic goods.

Opposition to mercantilist policies in Europe and the colonies continued to mount, leading the 13 American colonies to break with England in 1776, followed by the French Revolution, which initiated the overthrow of that nation's monarchy in 1789. These two great defining moments in political history were as much about the struggle to secure private property through free trade in open markets as they were about securing political freedom and democratic representation.

Any doubt on that score was quickly put to rest as the far modern nation-states deliberated the question of who should be extended the right to vote. The United States, Britain, France, and most other nation-states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries believed that the central mission of government was to protect private property and a market economy. With that rationale in mind, the right to vote was extended only to men of property, aligning the new nation-state with a market economy based on free exchange of private property."

Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society [pg 46]