Solidarity, Subsidiarity, and Consumerism

I've posted a new paper titled Solidarity, Subsidiarity, and the Consumerist Impetus of American Law.  This is my contribution to a forthcoming book put together by my colleague Teresa Collett and MoJ-er Michael Scaperlanda titled Recovering Self-Evident Truths: Catholic Perspectives on American Law.  In the paper, I try to connect solidarity and subsidiarity in a way that offers a response to the recent push to empower consumers and marginalize the moral agency of providers.

Perhaps I'm posting this now because I really need reader feedback; perhaps I'm posting this now because I really need to push Mark's dropping of the "F-bomb" off the main page before my dear grandmother figures out how to make use of the internet connection at her nursing home.  In any event, here is an excerpt:

Catholic social teaching speaks truth to the power of the liberal state by bearing witness to solidarity’s vision of the human person, realized within subsidiarity’s framework for the ordering of society. In the context of a free market economy, the practice of solidarity requires that service providers honor the dignity of the consumer, which is not coextensive with the autonomy of the consumer. Solidarity, then, can be realized only to the extent that service providers are empowered to meet needs in ways that diverge from, or even defy, the overarching norms of the collective—that is, solidarity is not possible absent a legal system that accepts the premise of subsidiarity.