I am glad to hear somebody else say that. There are lots of potential ways to provide coverage through our income taxes which weren't a part of the discussion when we got Obamacare.

I've personally advocated a "last choice insurance by government" plan where a national insurance plan would cover everyone, regardless of income or situation but where the full price of whatever cost was incurred was put into a balance with the IRS which would perpetually collect 10% of gross income as an additional income tax until the balance was repaid. Typical health insurance is about getting a reduced cost by paying for what you don't need just in case, where "last choice insurance by government" would be paying full cost for what you need, just deferred over the lifetime of the recipient. In return, we'd all pay some extra in income tax to cover the costs that weren't recovered from the recipients who needed the coverage.

People in this day and age believe that electronics are immoral. They live in the same world we do, though I sometimes wonder if they perceive it the same way.

Freedom is about allowing people to live the way they want to live, believe what they want to believe and live the way they believe is best. So long as their freedom doesn't harm someone else, I believe in freedom.

(But there is an answer to your question. You'll have to do the math yourself, I'm on my third glass of wine.) A 2005 Harris Poll found 90 percent of adult Catholics support contraception, just 3 percentage points lower than the general adult population.

We should care an awful lot when our government decides to dictate activity that contradicts longly held religious beliefs. If you're an atheist, it is about preventing the government from dictating that people must adhere to the religion they disagree with. Agnostics should fear that government may dictate they acknowledge the one true religion. Any religious person should fear the government will decide that another differing religion will be supported by their own government.

Whatever your ideal society is, the historical tendency is for governments to support single religions. One of the things that makes the US potentially a better place to live is that it is Constitutionally inhibited from doing the same thing as governments have often done. I like the US Constitution primarily because it is designed to limit the authority of the government. When I read about things which call in to question whether those limits should be upheld, I almost reflexively always say "limit the authority of the government."

Interesting point. Just for the record, I think I agree with you, but I find it helps me think more clearly to consider opposing arguments.

Assuming we as a society believe that widely adopted health insurance is good, then is it better to have it supplied directly by the government or better to allow wider choice provided by a more free but still highly regulated open market?

Compromise is something our society thinks we want. Yet, it does lead to issues just like this where we have to decide whether it is best to offer no choice (single-payer) healthcare, pure capitalism or regulated and incentivized semi-capitalism healthcare.

Religion X says that they are giving health insurance as an additional incentive to work for them, in other words - "pay". Then they are against some of the things the employee might spend that pay on, so they want the right to restrict how that employee spends what they have already been paid. In short, as you put it, the goverment has decided that once you pay somebody something, you have no right to dictate how they spend that money. (That's why saying "In Short..." is usually a mistake, it makes it to easy to reduce one side's more complex, nuanced opinion to a sound-bite that "nobody in their right mind" could possibly disagree with). Christians that have taken the position their church can or should control money they have already given to an employee

That's a fair point. I get the choice whether to pay for health insurance from my employer. If I choose not to, I have the money I would have spent to spend on other insurance (or booze) of my choice. In my case, insurance isn't part of my pay, it is an optional agreement I may or may not enter into with my employer. I think that's usually the case, but I don't know if that is what is going on with this case. I'll admit that with my admittedly limited knowledge of Justice Sonia Sotomayor's history, I assumed that she would support the spirit of Obamacare and that lead me to think she wouldn't issue an injunction unless she had serious concerns about the legality of the issue. If it's a choice, then it's not part of the pay, but if it isn't then perhaps it can rightfully be considered pay. I wish now that I'd taken the time to read up on the case, but it is two glasses of wine too late for me to maintain sufficient interest.

By what right can they take such benefits and then insist on not meeting the minimum standards for types of coverage the entity paying out those benefits imposes to get them?

Insurance providers have lots of things they decide not to cover. The question is whether the government has the authority to mandate this particular coverage which they previously didn't.

What's the moral difference between paying someone in health coverage and then trying to control how they spend it, and paying someone the cash portion of their pay in company money that can only be spent at the company store? Can the church demand to pay somebody their cash wages only by direct deposit, and then demand to see their monthy debit card statements each month to prove they haven't been spending any of that money on booze or lap dances during the time they weren't working?

Well the difference is in whether it is pay or a separate agreement. If my employer offered to give me a monthly stipend of 120% of my pay rate in return for entering a separate agreement to follow their specific spending guidelines, I'd consider the option. I don't know if I'd do it or not, but if I have the option to enter into a separate second agreement, it isn't just my regular pay. Our government does allow the same sort of thing with health insurance with an incentive for my company to offer that second agreement. Is that rational? Is it the best option for the society we want? That's a different question but maybe one that should be discussed more.

Sorry, but you missed the point. Religion A says that pill X is against their religion. Insurance company is a Religion A organization, but government says that Insurance company cannot refuse to give pill X regardless of what they believe. In short, the government has decided that you must provide a service you believe is immoral.

Anytime the government mandates that people do something they believe is immoral, I believe the law should be very carefully examined. Do I agree with their opinion of what is immoral? No. But this is a question of how free our society is, and specifically whether the government has the authority to force an organization to go against their religious beliefs.

Obamacare is something that is particularly problematic for religious organizations. It is the one of the first times our legislature has ever mandated that organizations must provide a service, which is problematic enough in itself, but further it specifies that organizations must provide a service contrary to their religious beliefs.

Whether you agree with Religion A or not, the important question is whether the government should have the authority to tell you what you must do even if you believe it is immoral. Flip the argument around and you're asking whether the government has the right to demand that you tithe to the Roman Catholic church regardless of what you believe. If they have the right to demand you do one thing against your beliefs, then they have the right to do others. The seperation of church and state was supposed to keep the government from dictating what activity you must participate in. Are you sure you want a government that has decided to ignore that separation?

What is IPv6 in your analogy then? EFT/Traditional currencies have the problems of government interference, heavy tracking and are expensive to move. The expense is really the big issue because we're used to the other problems, but they're not insignificant. If you want to call EFT with traditional currencies IPv4, that's fine, particularly since IPv6 is a working standard that fixes most of the problems with IPv4. Bitcoin is analogous to IPv6 quite accurately. Name any other peer-to-peer currency with a tenth the value of Bitcoin, or even any other method of electronically exchanging value that overcomes those issues and you can compare bitcoin to IPv9.

Calling current currencies IPv4 is a potentially agreeable analogy to me as well. There are a variety of limitations and problems people have with it. It's expensive to move, heavily tracked and tied to specific governments. IPv6 is an attempt to overcome those limitations and problems, and there have been some flaws found and resolved with IPv6. Bitcoin mirrors that pretty well too. Calling it IPv9 is a little bit of a jump since people are actually using bitcoin and the protocol is widely established. Name another peer-to-peer currency with more support if you want to make the argument that IPv9 is a better analogy.

Well maybe not. On the other hand I believe it was possible to buy a variety of things that aren't illegal on the Silk Road. I listen to a podcast where the commentators were talking about the twinkies they bought that way. There might be journalists who were using Silk Road to buy legal things and had their bitcoins seized. The argument could be made that it is like buying strawberries at a flea market where some sellers are engaging in illegal activity and the buyers of strawberries have a legitimate right to have their seized assets returned.

I'm really not sure how the legalities would play out, but I would like to see the legal system set some precedents on what constitutes legal property since Congress has suggested that bitcoin is at least sort of property.

The country Georgia uses the Georgian Lari as it's currency and there is about $4 billion worth in total. (Around 2/3 the total value of bitcoin.) I wouldn't consider Georgia as a major economic power, but I wouldn't dismiss the legitimacy of its currency based on the total number transactions done in Lari. The Lari is a big fish in its own pond. I find that comparison interesting even if it doesn't directly prove anything about the strength of bitcoin as a currency. I'd certainly say the Lari has critical mass.

I would agree that "Bitcoin isn't just a protocol, it's the block chain." You have to accept the Nakamoto block chain as the single legitimate chain in order to work with bitcoin in any of the common systems, otherwise you're working with a system which excludes the most common use opportunities. So what? The same can be said for IPv4 because ICANN is accepted as the authoritative system. Plenty of people start networks that don't use it as the authority and even large groups have toyed with creating their own authorities, and IPv4 doesn't mean ICANN. If you want the most common use opportunities then you accept the Nakamoto block chain and ICANN authority. Seeing a major change in either one is possible and extremely unlikely to happen anytime soon.

That's also the answer to "why would people like me who weren't early adopters of the original block chain want to grant early adopters huge fractions of the world's wealth for doing nothing of economic value?" If you want to use bitcoin or IPv4 (or IPv6 for that matter) then you have the widest range of opportunities by following the largest crowd.

That's not to say either system couldn't be changed if there was enough momentum behind a change. IPv6 is poised to replace IPv4 but if countries decided that they were going to each implement their own ICANN like authorities and provide a method for conversion/communication between countries, then IPv4 could be saved and some might argue that it should be. If a couple countries were to start their own new bitcoin chains with methods of conversion between national bitcoin chains, then they could make it work. In fact, I think that's probably the largest threat to the Nakamoto based system; nations setting up competing chains. Take Gerogia, they could start the Lari chain and set up to own the majority of their own chain then set up an exchange rate with the value of the traditional Lari decreasing in value each year for official transactions and in as little as a decade, we could see Georgia having a solid bitcoin based on the Lari change with the additional benefit of having better control of their own currency than they have now.

I'm not actually betting on the Nakamoto bitcoin system being the long term successor to traditional currency. I'm actually only investing in the idea that the dollar has at least 50 years of being a reliable currency. As a thought experiment, consider this scenario: You get one of two vouchers. Each is worth the equivalent $1 million in today's money in either "Lari" or "some future bitcoin like currency." The catch is that you only get paid if the ability to spend the one you choose is easier to spend in South Africa in January 2064. If I had that choice, I'd choose "some future bitcoin like currency" but if it was specifically "bitcoin based on the Nakamoto chain" then I don't know which I'd choose.

The difference with bitcoin is simply that it has already been widely adopted and protocols that are widely adopted are very, very, very hard to replace. IPv4, POP, FTP, Telnet and SMTP all have better replacements and yet they're still used practically everywhere. Being the first protocol to be widely adopted isn't just important, it is by far the single most important factor.

IPv5, IPv6, IPv7, IPv8 and IPv9 are making IPv4 pointless just like all the possible other digital currencies are making bitcoin pointless. I guess that's technically unfair since IPv4 does have to be replaced and look how quickly people are doing that.

The first widely adopted protocol is very, very, very hard to replace. Take IPv4, SMTP, FTP and Telnet as examples. All of them need replaced but they are still used and relied on all over the world.

The problem is that there are an infinite possible number of cryptographically signed digital currencies.

The problem is that there are an infinite possible number of ways to print something and call it a "dollar bill."

Is there any other cryptographically signed digital currency with a cumulative value near $6 billion dollars? If there isn't, then the infinite possible number of cryptographically signed digital currencies don't matter. Just like there are an infinite number of potential ways to print a new kind of dollar bill, they don't count unless a lot of other people are willing to accept it. If anything, bitcoins are much more difficult to fake.

Bitcoin has value because people use it to hold and exchange value, exactly like any other currency. Of course there are differences and I expect you are right about the future of speculation dying off, but precisely because I expect bitcoin to stabilize in ten years or so.

Oh, and read up on the tulip bulb thing. I thought the same thing you apparently think now until I got an education by somebody who actually knew the history.

All laws should have sunset provisions. No really, I mean it.

Those with strong support should have longer terms, maybe 100 years, but even the "obvious" ones should have sunset provisions. The Constitution? The only reason it has survived so long is because it has been modified, which is the whole point of sunset provisions. Do you think the Constitution would still work today if the three-fifths clause were still in effect or if women couldn't vote? The point of sunset provisions isn't to get rid of laws, but to give people an opportunity to correct problems with them. Yes, we correct problems with laws, but it takes an act of congress (literally) to get a law modified that desperately needs it, and you can forget about improving the hundreds of laws that have lots of problems but aren't on anybody's campaign points.

Or would you argue that there should be sunset provisions on the laws against murder?

Yes, of course there should be! Yes, murder should be illegal, but no, of course the laws we had for murder in the 1800's should not be in effect and they absolutely should be re-evaluated after a reasonable period of time has passed.

1800: Senator Bob: So it looks like the murder law is in sunset, do we vote to renew it?
1800: Senator Kim: No, my constituents think hanging is barbaric and want to switch to the electric chair, so we need to rewrite the law.
1900: Senator Ralph: So it looks like the murder law is in sunset, do we vote to renew it?
1900: Senator Kelly: No, my constituents think murder shouldn't have an automatic death penalty, and some people should just be imprisoned, so we need to rewrite the law.

And the budget? While I'm making imaginary changes to how US law works, I have a fix for the budget problem too. It should be required to be set three years in advance, with Congress and the Senate sequestered, with no other legislative action allowed until they have passed it. Emergency funding for unexpected issues should be what gets debated, not what we could have seen coming three years ago (or 50 for that matter.)

Every new law should have a sunset provision of 1 year to give it a chance at debate every year until (at least) every representative who was present when it was introduced is out of office. After that set a cap of 10 years, then 20, then 40, then 80 and max it at 120 since that's long enough that you can depend on the generation that got it passed to have also passed.

And not just "know where they are going," you can limit them to target=yourAccessTarget from the perimeter so they are limited at least in the first hop.