Three ways to fund government

There are several ways to fund a government. Almost all of them are prohibited to Christians, though we are definitely commanded to submit no matter what they do to us. We just aren't permitted to engage in such actions ourselves. How can you fund a government? You can:

1) Tax. Take money that doesn't belong to you. We're not allowed to do that, even if the money is for good purposes (Acts 5:4).

2) Borrow. Interestingly enough, many Christians believe that verses such as Romans 13:8 prohibit Christians from going into debt (although others disagree and believe this passage is teaching something else. I'm not going to address the theological issues here.). Either way, the Bible definitely proclaims debt to not be a good idea: borrowers become slaves: "The rich rules over the poor, And the borrower becomes the lender's slave." (Proverbs 22:7) And decent finance experts such as Dave Ramsey will tell you what a bad idea debt is. If debt is a bad idea for a person, how much more of a bad idea is it for a whole group of people to go into debt? And if it's bad for a person to be in debt, isn't it wrong to put other people in debt, through the means of the state? And if debtors are slaves, isn't the state enslaving itself and its citizens when it funds itself through debt? How could any Christian support giving an institution (the state) the power to put other people in debt without their consent?

But it gets worse: debts incurred by the government are never paid off by the people who made it. Government loans are paid off a generation or two later. In other words, when you authorize your government to borrow (all those bond issues we vote "YES" on), you are stealing from other people's children, and your own. "Children are not responsible to save up for their parents, but parents for their children." (II Corinthians 12:14) Should we be borrowing from our children's future, or saving up for them?

3) Inflation! This one is my favorite. Inflation is government caused, although you will hear a million and one other alleged causes of inflation. (The government likes for you to think it is not caused by them. They'd rather have you blaming greedy oil companies or something, and coveting what they own and continuing to support government theft.) Inflation is a direct violation of Leviticus 19:35-36. In ancient times, rulers accomplished inflation by melting down all the coins they took in, mixing in more and more base metal, and reminting the coins, so that they could make more coins that were actually worth less, hoping to trick people into accepting them at the same rate for a while. In modern times, we accomplish inflation by producing more and more dollars; the U.S. money supply is constantly growing, when instead it should be constant. Every time we bring a new dollar into existence, every other dollar in the world shrinks slightly in purchasing power in order to "create" the new purchasing power of the new dollar. In other words: creating a new dollar is theft: it steals a small amount of value from every owner of dollars in the world. Repeat it a billion times and you've stolen quite a bit of value. God's ordained free market picked an inflation-proof money; you can read more about this and how government forcibly (and with direct theft) interfered with this decision in order to make inflation easier in Whatever Happened to Penny Candy, by Richard Maybury, or What Has Government Done to our Money? by Murray Rothbard. The Rothbard book is available for free online at the previous link, or you can buy it. The Maybury book is easier to understand (it's written for children) and is actually for sale at most homeschool bookfairs I've been to. Both of them have insights and information that the other does not.