RTWT, but here’s enough to whet your appetite:
Whatever [government] does achieve comes at a terrible cost. If you include all forms of taxation, government confiscates about 40 to 50 percent of our income every year. What we receive for this robbery in goods and services is a pretty poor trade by any measure. Our schools turn out ill-mannered ignoramuses by the millions, many of them not fit for anything but Congress. Our health care system is a shell game where Peter is robbed and Paul doesn’t even get paid. Our social security system is a transparent Ponzi scheme that, if perpetrated by an individual, would earn him life in prison. The U.S. Treasury is the world’s greatest counterfeiter, inflicting on us an invisible form of taxation called inflation.
At this point some Christian readers are no doubt gnashing their teeth and saying, “But Scripture supports the idea of government! It tells us to obey lawful authorities and to pay our taxes! Jesus was a spiritual revolutionary, not a political one!” All true. But not the whole truth. Yes, Jesus took great pains to make sure his mission was not mistaken for a political uprising–and even so, some authorities did take it that way. Both the Old and New Testaments urge believers to be good citizens and to obey as much of the civil law as conscience allows. And even Jesus paid his taxes, though by having Peter pull the money from the mouth of a fish he turned the act into a form of subtle satire that should not be misconstrued as an uncritical endorsement of taxation.
We need to look at other biblical passages for a more complete picture of how God views earthly governments. Consider when the prophet Samuel attempts to dissuade the Israelites from choosing a secular king:
“And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots. And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots. And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants. And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day” (1 Sam. 8:11–18).
Admittedly, the king described by Samuel (who turned out to be King Saul) was unlike our modern leaders in one crucial respect: he only took 10 percent of his people’s belongings for his own uses. That makes him four or five times more generous than anyone in Washington, D.C.
