Please clarify how reliable government-issued ID impacts personal freedom. You're making an awfully big leap here.
This argument seems to be based on an assumption of the right to anonymously take out loans, make bank transactions, and conduct business with the government. That right simply doesn't exist. People don't have a right to passable fake ID either, which is all this system really prevents.
Requiring ID for activities that shouldn't require it (prepaid cell phones, flight, all electronic forms of US dollars) is an invasion of privacy. Having more secure ID for activities that do isn't.
That's the reason I don't understand the opposition: the government is perfectly able to identify a individual person from its interconnected databases, the lack of an ID card just means you have a hard time identifying yourself.
What you actually want is better control over how government agencies handle your personal information, but I guess people are less spooked by ambiguous worded legislation and databases than by physical pieces of plastic.
It truly boggles my mind that the US has such a backwards stance on government issued IDs.
Whatever argument you have about why this is a good thing is utterly lacking in substance, because the US has a defacto ID and it's horrendously bad (talking about that SSN).
Just issue a proper ID system for goodness sake, what a stupid set of problems to have in the modern era :/
Exactly. It's a terrible tool for that job and wasn't designed for it, but there's such a great need for something like that, that businesses and governments have grabbed onto it anyway, for lack of something better.
Despite what might be described as an absolutely huge market signal that there's desire and need for this, resistance to actual national ID is so high among elected officials that propositions for it have, so far, always been DOA. Maybe national IDs really are terrible and it's worth the shared-over-the-population pain and expense not having one causes in a modern society and economy, IDK.
It would get them out of the ID business, or yield federal dollars to be in that business.
It would also streamline lots of use cases that require ID. Various federal programs administered by states require that you authenticate people in different ways. The states spend millions to do a shitty job (driven by Fed requirements) for unemployment, social services, Medicaid, etc.
Everything you say is true of state IDs too. They are not mandated. They are useful because some people choose to have them. Some people would also choose to have a federal id.
I never really understood the objection to national ID. Is it really that much worse than state IDs? Tracking can work either way, that seems like a different fight. Companies seem to use the SSN anyway.
Probably the majority of US citizens do not want a federal ID card. A number of states refuse to comply with the RealID requirements on their drivers licenses and others are dragging their feet. As a result the drivers licenses of some states won't be suitable for federal identification soon.
At one level it's a bit silly as many have passports and drivers licenses are (almost) a form of universal ID. On the other hand, I sympathize with the push against mandatory federal ID.
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