My current brace of columns includes one at Crisis Magazine about the trend away from concrete loyalties and objective principles toward radical subjectivity and a combination of money and bureaucracy as the basis for what’s still called public life. The other one, at Catholic World Report, makes the obvious point that the result is unlivable and we should all go out and refound Christendom.
The Orthosphere 
Jim: With my “Business in Literature” students I have been reading The Gift by Marcel Mauss. The Gift is about archaic exchange systems. In his “Conclusion,” Mauss hazards the thesis that modern, abstract systems of exchange are immoral, because they so radically contradict the intensely human character of archaic exchange. It occurs to me that consumerism is a type of radical subjectivity, one which reduces the subject to the bland recipient, or rather the mere destination, of goods “purchased” by the fictional value of what we laughingly call “money.” I argue to my students that the most virtuous businesses are those that stay small, shake lots of hands, and give away lots of freebies.
I apply a “look the guy in the eye” test. If you couldn’t do that in good faith then there’s something wrong. E.g., if you add in additional charges people don’t notice, or design snack food based on studies of addiction, you should pick a different business model.
Here is a sonnet by William Wordsworth that plays into your thesis (we discussed it in “Business in Literature”):
[Of particular interest are the first four lines]
Which reminds me of these two selections:
and
I recommend reading both poems in full.