Sin, Tyranny, and the Metaphysics of Money

It is commonly assumed that states pay for goods and services with money collected through taxation. Taxation is coercive, and according to political liberals, the use of funds acquired through taxation must be publicly justified. In this article, we propose that, according to an alternative theory of money, states do not need to use money collected through taxation to pay for goods and services. Rather, states can simply create any amount of money. As a result, we show that certain influential objections offered by political liberals to the state funding of art galleries, abortion services, and churches are unsuccessful.