tinfoil must flow or something

Thomas Jefferson's concept of a "wall of separation between church and state" has become a source of mania for those who identify as being on both the left and right for the last generation. I would argue that the idea itself is an excellent one - the federal government cannot interfere in any individual's practice of his religion (with apologies to Aum Shinrikyo), and no religion can assume government power to coerce those who disregard it. The bizzare permutations this idea has developed into in the last 50 years - from those who claim that it allows forcing all public school students to recite the lord's prayer to those who want to ban singing christmas songs in town squares - underscores the increasing belief that a centralized state ought to serve as some sort of santa who works to grant the wishes, no matter how absurd, of its consituents.

If one accepts that keeping the state out of religion is good, though, then why not apply the idea to other human activities? For instance, why not a separation of economy and state? How can one consider it undesirable for a government to collect tithes from a nonbelieving citizen but be ok with it collecting taxes from a citizen who has never consented to the services the government demands he fund? How can one differentiate between a state which tells its citizens how to pray and one which tells an employer how much to pay his employees? In both cases state intrusion into the private, voluntary acts of its citizens is explained by the state as improving the welfare of its citizens - the former could be a shill of henry viii explaining that its necessary to keep a man out of hell and protect the moral fiber of the rest of king hank's subjects, regardless of what the man himself thought, the second could be a federal prosecutor today telling a federal judge that the federal government knows better than the two parties who of their own accord agreed to a contract what the terms of the contract should have been.

To someone whose beliefs fall within what is generally accepted as the mainstream it might seem intuitive that what someone does with money is fundamentally different than what he does in church or his bedroom and as such ought to be subject to public control. It doesn't seem reasonable to me that suspicion of a state telling a man what to do with his koran or his sex toys doesn't extend to telling him what to do with his wealth. Unless money posesses a magical quality which makes the voluntary exchange of it free game for the state as opposed to, say, the voluntary exchange of bodily fluids (which as it happens DO have magical properties), there's no justifiable cutoff point for saying which areas of human action and interaction are subject to state control and which are not.