Counterfeiting

What do you think about counterfeiting? Is there anything wrong with it? Counterfeiting is illegal, but should it be? Does it hurt anybody?

When a person counterfeits a dollar bill, he can immediately spend it (assuming he did a good enough job), so the faux bill has some value. It is worth roughly a dollar. Where did this value come from?

With a new dollar in circulation, everybody else's dollars are worth slightly less. If there were only one thousand dollars in existence before the counterfeit, then every one of those bills lost value equal to one-tenth of a cent, in order to make up the value that the new bill received.

This effect is trivial for one single one dollar bill. Nobody counterfeits "one spots," anyway. But if an operation cranks out hundreds and hundreds of twenties, suddenly the effect is not so insignificant. If a person or group were allowed to keep manufacturing money in this way, they would eventually steal a large portion of the value of the rest of the money supply. So counterfeiting hurts everybody.

Here's the lesson: your government can do the exact same thing. I'm not just talking about the ability to print money: through the sale of treasury instruments, through banking mechanisms, and through good old fashioned printing, the United States government has the power to manufacture new money. When this happens, it hurts people, just the same as if it were done by somebody else. It doesn't magically become helpful just because the government does it instead of a common criminal. It doesn't magically become safe just because we took a vote on it. And it doesn't magically become a good idea because some economists (paid by the government -- go figure) claim that the money supply needs to "expand." I already showed you above what happens when the money supply is expanded like this, and it is not a good thing.

Creation of money is stealing. It changes the value of everybody else's money. It violates the command of Leviticus 19:36 -- it makes the measure of our dollar unjust and changing. Originally a dollar was equal to about one ounce of silver, or about one-twentieth of an ounce of gold. If people wanted more dollars, they had to work for them, either by selling goods or services that they labored to produce, or by digging them out of the ground.

Should Christians support the government producing more money out of nothing? Because this is one area where both of the major political parties have the same stance. They are squarely in favor of government continuing to have this power.