This pretty much sums up my position wrt trade in the TU.
I first came across this position wrt interstellar trade as a side comment in a review of CT:LBB5:HGv2 in SPI's old 'Ares" mag published shortly after HGv2 was released.
At the time I wasn't into Trav yet (I played SPI's sci-fi rpg 'Universe' instead) but the article intrigued me & led me, shortly thereafter, to 'take the plunge' into the TU.

--------------------------------------------
On Thu, 5/7/15, Richard Aiken <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

 Subject: Re: [TML] Finding transport
 To: xxxxxx@simplelists.com
 Date: Thursday, May 7, 2015, 12:07 AM

 On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 8:07
 PM, Craig Berry <xxxxxx@gmail.com>
 wrote:
 Well, as soon as you start invoking the infinitely
 large supply of raw material, the game stops being Traveller
 pretty quickly. Nobody has any need to go anywhere, to ship
 anything anywhere, to invade anywhere. Almost everyone
 happily sits in their home system, mining moons and
 asteroids as needed.
 All
 true.  It ends up looking more like a typical transhuman
 setting.
 Not so much, as you need
 commonly-available AI for that, which in the non-Virus
 versions of Traveller doesn't
 exist.  Traveller requires an economy of scarcity to look
 even vaguely like canon. And an economy of scarcity leads to
 trade, and trade leads to economies of
 scale.
 I
 believe that it's possible to have an interstellar
 economy of scarcity and limited interstellar trade volume at
 one and the same time, AS LONG AS that trade primarily
 involves luxury goods. By "luxury" I mean that on
 the sale end of each trade transit the particular cargo
 being carried can't be locally produced (or at least
 can't be locally produced in economical amounts), yet it
 also isn't essential to life or even to comfort. Cargo
 such as this is what the top 1% of consumers on the
 destination world can afford.
 Given the glacial annual economic
 growth rate of the OTU (I think GT:FT puts it at ~0.25%),
 the aggregate demand for luxury cargo would be relatively
 restricted and pretty much rock steady along a given route.
 A situation like RL modern China - where a less-wealthy
 economy suddenly becomes substantially wealthier in a
 relatively short time span - would be extremely rare. Since
 both the number of possible consumers and the scarce supply
 of any given luxury good is largely fixed, so is the low
 demand. All that will change on a noticeable scale is
 *which* luxury good is in current demand. Staying abreast of
 fashions in high-end consumer goods (at least in the markets
 that they frequent) thus becomes highly important to
 interstellar traders. 
 BTW, a low-trade OTU still justifies
 a large Imperium. Such an Imperium exists in order to
 encourage the development of luxury trade among systems
 which are largely self-sufficient economically. It does so
 in order to foster a sense of interstellar community among
 these worlds. Absent such a sense of interstellar community
 (limited though it might be), there is no reason for any
 particular set of close-neighbor worlds to *care* about
 helping defend any particular other set of close-neighbor
 worlds from external attack. The Imperial Core Worlds wish
 to remain safe, yet don't wish to spend the enormous
 amounts of cash necessary to actively garrison a sprawling
 frontier. So they finance their protection by selling the
 Frontier Worlds on the social concept of, "Hey!
 We're all in this together,
 gang!"
 --
 Richard Aiken

 "Never insult anyone by
 accident."  Robert A. Heinlein"A word
 to the wise ain't necessary -- it's the stupid ones
 that need the advice." - Bill Cosby"We
 know a little about a lot of things; just enough to make us
 dangerous." Dean Winchester

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