Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Beyond Makers and Takers: The Real Diversity of Society
Beyond Makers and Takers: The Real Diversity of Society
Jul 18, 2025 8:00 PM

As I noted last week, my review of Nicholas Eberstadt’s Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic appears in the current issue of The City, a fine publication produced by Houston Baptist University.

Eberstadt provides an important service in bringing home the fiscal realities of the spending crisis facing the American government. But Yuval Levin’s brief reply was, for me, the high point of the book, as it emphasized the indispensability of the so-called “third sector” in social analysis. Eberstadt’s case is helpful for drawing sharp lines, but it’s also worth taking a step back to appreciate the plexity of the situation.

This is in part why I find any dichotomous breakdown of the situation, whether it pits “makers” against “takers” or the proletariat against the bourgeosie, to be insufficient.

When you have a fuller picture of society than is provided through merely political lenses, it es far more difficult to determine who is really a maker and who is really a taker. Or as Joseph Sunde puts it in his review,

The moment we disregard the value in varying social and institutional relationships—beginning with a holistic disregard of the distinct responsibilities of the government vs. the business vs. the school vs. the church vs. the father vs. the daughter vs. the grandmother—is the moment we should expect to see “dependency” e warped toward a one-sided “entitlement archipelago” that serves the self, and little else.

As for plexity of modern society, Herman Bavinck describes things this way, in a manner that plicates any simple oppositional narrative:

Current society displays in every respect the greatest inequality and the richest diversity, far greater inequality and diversity than its opponents usually imagine. For they divide society actually into only two classes: the filthy rich and the dirt poor, the superpowerful and the powerless, the abusers and the abused, tyrants and slaves. But the real society, the society that lives and breathes, does not look at all like that; the diversity is far greater, so great that no one can form plete picture of it. The filthy rich constitute a very small minority, and of these people, membership along a continuum proceeds down to the bottom not by a big leap but rather in terms of a gradual slope in various degrees and in various stages.

For more on these matters, I highlight Bavinck’s insight and the phenomenon of natural diversity, particularly in economic terms, in a recent paper, “The Moral Challenges of Economic Equality and Diversity.”

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Is it really ‘aid’ if it goes to relatively wealthy nations?
Alan Duncan, an aid minister in the UK, says his government is “forced” to hand over large amounts of money to the EU’s foreign aid budget, but has no say in how the money is spent. The problem is that much of the $2 billion+ “aid” money (one-sixth of the British budget) goes to projects such as making a Moroccan water park more eco-friendly, an art project in St. Petersburg, and building a hotel and plex in Barbados. Britain’s International...
Markets and culture: A time to play, a time to pray
Faced with the prospect of a professional athletic career, a nearly-half million dollar salary, and a perfect lady, what’s not to like? Apparently, for Grant Desme, it was the noise and unrest of the world. Can a culture of life and the noise and tumult of the marketplace co-exist? Rev. Robert Sirico, reflecting on this, says they can, so long as it is not a place where: [C]apitalism…places the human person at the mercy of blind economic forces…What we propose,...
Rev. Sirico on Life, Work, and Human Flourishing
J.Q. Tomanek of Ignitum Today interviewed Rev. Sirico about life, work, human flourishing, and his new book, Defending the Free Market: JQ Tomanek: Back in the day, holiness was misinterpreted as a cleric or religious life thing. How can a lay Catholic practice their faith? What are some ways to sanctify our work as lay Catholics? Is “ora et labora” just a monk thing? Reverend Sirico: Yes, religious people are often tempted to e so “heavenly minded they are no...
Want to Help the Poor? Promote a Free Market in Health Care
Want to help the poor? Promote a free market in health care. That’s the argument made by John C. Goodman, author of the new book Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis. Timothy Dalrymple recently talked with Goodman about the best approach for restoring free-market pricing mechanisms into the market for medical care and health insurance: Aren’t there some people, however, who have little of money and lots of time, and would prefer to wait in order to receive cheaper care? There...
Stop Apologizing for Our Liberties
You cannot apologize to a fanatic, says Lee Harris. It only serves to convince him that he was right all along: The last few weeks have witnessed a peculiar and disturbing spectacle: An American administration that has spent a great deal of time and energy apologizing for our liberties—in particular, for what many would regard as the foundation of all our other liberties, namely, the freedom to express our minds as we see fit. This signature freedom, of which Americans...
How were people On Call in Culture 165 years ago?
What is so special about 1837? That was the year Abraham Kuyper was born. September 29th is his 165th birthday. So we thought we would go back to 1837 and see how people were being On Call in Culture back then. We don’t know if they were all believers on a mission to bless the world, but by seeing what was going on 165 years ago, we hope you are encouraged to engage your world in 2012! How did people...
Counting the Profit of a Third Party Choice
Joe Carter recently highlighted the discussion at Ethika Politika, the journal of the Center for Morality in Public Life, about the value of (not) voting, particularly the suggestion by Andrew Haines that in some cases there is a moral duty not to vote. This morning I respond with an analysis of the consequences of not voting, ultimately arguing that one must not neglect to count the cost of abstaining to vote for any particular office. One issue, however, that I...
On Call with Dr. Pamela Casson
Dr. Pamela Casson, a pediatrician in Colorado Springs, knows what it means literally to be “On Call.” This week she shares with us in this video interview with Jon Hirst how she sees God working through her in her work with families, children and the world around her. Thank you Pamela for giving us an inside look at how you see your work as blessing the world. ...
Did 2,362 Millionaires Get Unemployment Checks in 2009? (Answer: Yes they did.)
The Congressional Research Service (CRS), a group that works exclusively for the U.S. Congress, issued a report with one of the greatest titles I’ve ever seen on a government document: Receipt of Unemployment Insurance by e Unemployed Workers (“Millionaires”) Now the first nine words are nothing special, typical policy-wonk speak. But whoever added in the word “millionaires” with scare quotes and parentheses is a genius. Most people would have been nodding off around the word “Insurance” but seeing millionaires (that’s...
Dodd-Frank: The Other Serious Threat
At least es at us head on. The greater legislative threat may be the one that most Americans have never heard of. Economist Scott Powell and Acton friend Jay Richards explain in a new piece in Barron’s: While Obamacare received more attention, the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, also known as Dodd-Frank after its Senate and House sponsors, … unleashed a new regulatory body, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to operate with unprecedented power. Dodd-Frank became law in...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved