Awhile back I noticed somewhere that the Bible positively prohibits Israel’s rulers from multiplying wives (inter- and intranational covenants/treaties) and multiplying horses and chariots (war technology). It also never says that rulers are supposed to use their tax revenues to fund entitlements for the population or some portion of the population. So American Evangelicals often argue in favor of multiplying and stockpiling WMD and against the legitimacy of entitlements and welfare.
A related thought occurs to me now. We have, as far as I can tell, zero prohibitions in Scripture barring anyone from receiving financial aid from the civil magistrate, but we have a bunch of prohibitions in the Bible against going into debt, or at least warnings that it is a stupid and dangerous thing to do. But Evangelicals are far more likely to resist receiving government assistance than they are likely to avoid debt.
Maybe Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express are actually more economically dangerous and enslaving than the Welfare State. I’m not settled on that point, but I think it is worth considering.
Completely agree re: Visa, MasterCard, etc. I’ve also thought how odd it is to live in a society where the most important investments of our lives, e.g., a house or an education, are things we are expected to go into debt for. To buy a house outright would require the better part of a lifetime’s worth of savings. But we need a house now to raise our families in, so we go into debt and spend our lives paying it off. Education similarly. We can’t wait until we’ve saved $40,000 to go to grad school if we want to be a pastor/teacher/doctor/engineer, etc. We need it while we’re young, not when we theoretically would have enough to pay for it. So we go into debt. Weird.