All the debate on the constitutionality of the individual mandate you could ever want from me and Reason's Peter Suderman:
On the individual mandate: What I'm not sure I said very well is that it doesn't really make sense to say that the government can regulate "noneconomic activity" under the commerce clause but not "economic inactivity." That's gibberish. It makes more sense to say that not buying health insurance has a substantial effect on interstate commerce than growing medical marijuana for personal use. There's no question that if the Supreme Court were to rule based on precedent, the ACA would be constitutional. I think the reliance of the ACA's critics on scenarios like the "broccoli mandate" actually undermines the notion that the mandate will lead to limitless government power over private behavior, in the sense that the most popular example is profoundly unrealistic. To say that we are only the wisdom of lawmakers and the integrity of judges away from a dystopia in which the government regulates the finest details of our private lives is to put us back where we started.
On the inherent conservatism of video games: Peter has a lot more interesting things to say on this point -- I was inarticulate after trying to switch from serious mode. Basically, I think video games have the same kind of "inherent conservatism" as say, action movies. That goes beyond say, the economics of SimCity into the kind of video games that are most popular: Violent resolutions are privileged over diplomatic ones, and that's even in the few games that have the latter available. You play games like Halo for the same reason you watch a movie like Predator -- to enjoy the vicarious thrill of fantasy violence. Realism makes that difficult for me, which is why I suspect I don't like games like Call of Duty very much. This is true even in games like say, Squaresoft RPGs produced before 2000, almost all of which have explicitly environmentalist themes, or, as Suderman points out, in Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, where conservative Supreme Court justices are villains but where you essentially still solve problems by killing people.
