It has the potential to hamper the government's ability to run society by allowing for citizens to control the earnings of their labor in an anonymous private environment. There is little accountability in a citizen paying their dues. How could you like this? Why are you here? Why don't you just keep supporting the US dollar or other fiat currencies?

It's possible to wish for the government to provide welfare or regulate the economy while also wishing for an honest hard money system. These goals are not incompatible or contradictory.

I don't think Bitcoin hampers a government's ability to fund itself any more than the use of cash does. Any business of significant size won't be able to get around paying all legally required taxes regardless of whether they use USD or alternative currencies. Bitcoin no more subverts the welfare state than shopping at the farmers' market.

I think there is no way you could provide social-democratic type of welfare with "honest hard money system". I think welfare is largely based on the dishonesty of the fiat currency and central banking. Fiat currency and ever-growing public debt is a way around the fact that welfare simply leads to bankruptcy. Plain and simple. People just don't see how their money is stolen from them until the government is completely bankrupt like in Greece. With "honest hard money system" people would see it from the start and there would be soon a bloody revolt. If you think you could just rise taxes for some rich people and fund welfare to millions of unproductive types, you are a lunatic.

This is certainly true.  Do you know any farmers who pay sales taxes because they sell extra veggies at a farmers' market?  I know I don't.  The goverment agents don't get sideways with them because 1) it's a small market with little expected gain 2) it's bad p.r. because they know that the public favors these markets and 3) it would help to come down on publicly advertised farmers' markets because they know that there is already a great deal more private activity that they can't find.  Farmers' markets are like advertising for the farmers that do this kind of thing, they aren't the bulk of the dark market activity.

If Bitcoin ever goes truly mainstream, the governments of the "Western" nations are most definitely going to feel the pinch, and most of them already have enough trouble paying for the social services as it is.  Considering that governments worldwide really do consider "national defense" (however they define it) to be their primary reason for existence, do you think that social safety nets are going to be supported while the pentagon has to hold a bake sale?

Rick Falkvinge had an interesting post on this topic recently:

http://falkvinge.net/2011/05/19/the-information-policy-case-for-flat-tax-and-basic-income/

I see no functional difference between bitcoin and cash in this regard.

i don't "like" bitcoin per se, but i find it an interesting idea and am interesting in seeing how an economy will function with a non-inflationary currency.

just because a portion of the bitcoin community is populated by anarchists, lunatics, and hopefully not terrorists doesn't means i can't find bitcoin useful and/or interesting.

Pretty much at the point that liberals decided to abandon the concept of rights in favor of mobocracy and wealth redistribution.

Sometime after the death of FDR, the "progressive" movement that characterized the entire first half of the last century in the United States was discredited as having largely been co-opted by socialists.  Following this, these same socialist-lite progressives altered the public image during the next several decades by taking the term 'liberal' from what was once the libertarians of the day.  The liberty minded liberals of the 1900's and earlier are often called "classical liberals" today, and that means roughly the same thing as the term "libertarian" in the modern lexicon; which is a word that was made up in the 1970's because 'social progressives' had distorted the term in the view of the US political context.  So when you hear someone from the United States say "liberal" or "progressive" in a political context, Europeans can safely hear "socialist" and be pretty close.  Although Europeans are not likely to look at Obama and think that he compares with the socialists or progressives in European politics, this is because Obama can only do so much without severe political backlash and not a fundamental difference in ideology.

However, your understanding of "conservative" in the US context is also a bit wrong.  Generally speaking, a "conservative" in the US political context is not someone who wishes to 'preserve' the status quo, but a 'fascist lite'.

In my experience, people who say stuff like this don't watch Fox News enough to even know anything useful about the network or their viewership.  Like those who blab about how crazy Glenn Beck is only know what he looks like from two minutes youtube outakes.