US Lawmakers Eyeing National ID Card 826
According to Wired (and no big surprise, considering the practicalities of implementing massive changes in medical finance), US lawmakers "are proposing a national identification card, a 'fraud-proof' Social Security card required for lawful employment in the United States. The proposal comes as the Department of Homeland Security is moving toward nationalizing driver licenses."
Lol. (Score:1, Insightful)
You just got the right to healthcare, but do you really want that going to illegal immigrants?
Yes.
Yeah no problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice national ID cards for our safety and you know just to be on the safe side we need a DNA database too, to prevent people from misusing this program...and hey we need to start monitoring your internet usage to prevent people from pretending to be you and setting up appoitments or chaning your information.
Yeah its nothing to be worried about, Im sure it will be all OK.
National Drivers License (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:5, Insightful)
"You just got the right to healthcare, but do you really want that going to illegal immigrants?"
That's actually a bizarre statement. The options are:
1) Illegal immigrants can pay for health care in the open market (potentially taxpayer subsidized).
2) We can pay for illegal immigrants to go to hospitals as indigent care (definitely taxpayer subsidized).
I don't really understand why people would go for #2. If I can choose 100% loss vs. even 95% loss, I'm going to go with the 95%.
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure why Slashdot is so afraid of this. You don't have a right to be anonymous to your employer. You don't have a right to avoid taxes. You just got the right to healthcare, but do you really want that going to illegal immigrants?
Why? Because we've already gone through this with the social security number, which was promised to be only used to administer social security benefits, and is now used for everything.
We don't want any more stinking ID!!!
Still think Obamacare is a good idea? (Score:0, Insightful)
Hey all you slashdotters who though that nationalizing healthcare was a good idea: Any buyer's remorse yet? Remember, we're still on day one of Obamacare. What new surprises can we expect from our newly-empowered paternal government in the weeks, months, and years to come?
Timmay! (Score:1, Insightful)
What's the matter, didn't get enough page views on the healthcare non-article?
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:3, Insightful)
I've had this talk with a number of people. They argue that if you have nothing to hide why hide?
Well, what if they make something illegal that is a basic right.
What if alcohol was illegal?
What if being homosexual was illegal?
What if being black meant you were not allowed to vote?
What if being female meant you were not allowed to vote?
But your right, it's not like the US has a precedent of have laws like that.
All crimes are committed by the living, therefore living is a crime (Judge Death, 2000AD)
Re:How do Republicans support this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Fraud proof? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no such thing as fraud proof. Humans are involved in the process and humans are corruptible.
In fact, fraud proof makes it difficult to prove someone stole your identity if they some how manage to fraudulently apply for ID in your name.
Re:This ought to be good (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, everything is all good.
Until they can REVOKE your right to work because of your political beliefs or associations...
Party on!
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:4, Insightful)
This being MY country and MY birthright, fuck them.
So which boat did your ancestors come in on?
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:4, Insightful)
.
It costs money to pay police officers to make sure people can't rob your house and kill your kids. The money to pay for these officers was taken by force from other people. Are you going that you don't have a fundamental right not to be killed by random strangers? Some of these tax-payers had enough money to defend themselves with private security forces, why should their money be stolen just to pay for your "security"? Socialism!!!
All rights cost something, that's the point.
Do we really want this? (Score:2, Insightful)
Over the years there have been number of larger polls concerning a national ID system. Each and every time the results have been very conclusive and clear cut: The vast majority of Americans is strongly opposing the establishment of a national ID system. The reasons range from privacy to practical, philosophical, and religious concerns. Instead of weakening our constitutional rights and taking away our privacy little by little, our representatives need to respect democratic opinion and decisions and the will of its own people and stop trying to push a national ID system on us. This has happened in the UK where people are finally waking up and protesting on the streets now, only that it's too late for them. We are not in the UK, China, or North Korea here. The US is a democratic country and our government and representatives need to respect that. Period.
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:1, Insightful)
If I find a person in my home without my permission (i.e. an intruder), I'm going to warn him to leave voluntarily. If he refuses then he will eat a bullet.
I see no reason to treat intruders from Mexico or Canada or any part of the World differently - Leave voluntarily or face the consequences. Perhaps not shoot them dead, but they should definitely be escorted out of my country, handed a Visa application, and told not to return until they receive permission.
It's part of the fantasy (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the same reason militia groups train in the woods. They like to pretend that they could defend themselves against the United States Armed Forces. It's simply a distraction against the things that really protect freedom, like voting, community organizations, or being an active citizen in the Athenian sense.
The standing army is used for foreign coup d'etats instead of civil wars on home soil. They learned a long time ago that giving you the "choice" of entertainment, fast food joints, cars, and clothes is far more effective distraction from participatory democracy than direct government violence.
In the fantasized bleak future, the government wins because they have a national ID card. In reality, you are already owned by your debt. You either plead fealty to the system in exchange for access to material goods, and live and die by your credit report, or you suffer the consequences.
I don't see the problem (Score:2, Insightful)
really, you should travel more. here in europe our gobernments have had track of our IDs for decades and we have social security, that will cover me for instance, if i travel to the US (it will pay the costs of any injury i might have and your hospitals will treat it as if it were an insurance company). so what? is anyone coming home to kill me because he knows a number related to my name?
i can tell you the problem: fear.
afraid of someone who's got your ID number? so what? I show my ID every night I go out, I show it every time I pay plastic, and so on, and... nothing goes wrong. same with my social security card, and even if i dont have it, if i have a health problem i know i can go to the hospital and they will take care of me. when im capable of, they will ask for an ID, ssec card or something, but i will be alive. and don't start moaning about inmigrants, 'cause Spain is being called the "door of Europe" in the northern Africa countries, and we still have no problems dealing with illegals coming in all the time..
and if you are about to say i misspelled something, yeah probably I did, English is not my mother language.
cheers all, and do be so afraid of helping your neighbours fgs
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's exactly what the real native true blooded americans should have done when your ancestors waltzed on in pretending they had some kind of a right to be there.
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? Because we've already gone through this with the social security number, which was promised to be only used to administer social security benefits, and is now used for everything.
True enough. As far as I can tell, though, I have yet to be seriously harmed by my SSN. The data security provisions of my bank might be another matter, but my SSN is no more harmful to me than my name, my phone number, my dedicated IP address, or the primary keys assigned to me in any of hundreds of databases. I'm certainly not going to wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat thinking, "Oh shit! I've been assigned another number!"
We don't want any more stinking ID!!!
Meh. Doesn't even rank in the top hundred things that worry me about the government. Any number of both free and unfree countries have such things, and like gun ownership, to which the same applies, there's not much correlation between that and the local degree of personal freedom. And frankly, I'd rather not have my tax dollars going to paying for the errors and duplication of effort that come from not having a single, reliable personal ID.
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, I'll be sure to let Germany know that they're about to go bankrupt. They'll be pretty surprised what with their economy kicking ours' ass, but I'm sure they'll see the writing on the wall when I tell em rubycodez said so.
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:3, Insightful)
The country was empty when my ancestors arrived with only 20 states in existence.
Now it's full. In fact I dare say it's overpopulated, since we're wallowing in our own pollution. When oil rises above $200 a barrel in the 2020s, making food scarce and energy expensive, we won't be able to sustain our 310 million persons. We should be seeking to SHRINK the population (block immigration) not increase it. (Same applies to the EU.)
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:4, Insightful)
Mine came here LEGALLY. Know and understand the distinction...
I got a fistful of broken treaties with those who walked over that says "legal" is a stack of BS post-justification written by the occupiers. Just sayin'.
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:2, Insightful)
Furthermore, just like any other required documentation it will turn into another useless nightmare for citizens. Before going you will need to scrounge up 100 documents and pictures, etc. Then you will need to make an appointment. Then you will have to pay some ludicrous processing fee. Then take a day off work to stand in line for a day and deal with some fat government slob, etc. Then wait an entire month to get the stupid thing (which means you won't be able to travel/get a job/drive/etc while you wait for a stinking month for them to make a laminated card.) And then God knows how many months it will take for those clowns to process a change of address/etc. The PITA of a driver's license and a social security card should be enough to scare the living crap out of anyone with half a brain from wanting a national id card.
What sort of hell do you live in, friend? Here in Massachusetts the process to get a driver's license is painless: bring a few documents you already have and should keep well-filed (a paystub or bank statement, a passport or other state ID, that sort of stuff) to your local Registry of Motor Vehicles office, hit a few buttons on the automated kiosk, wait a few minutes in the chairs the provide and fill out the form if you haven't done so already, go up when they call your number, hand your stuff over, get a temporary ID. You'll get your real one in about week. I did this in November of last year; it took a total of 15 minutes. You can travel and get a job with your pre-existing documents and the temporary ID you get is for driving. What's the problem? If my state can figure out how a deli works, why can't others?
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:1, Insightful)
The data security provisions of my bank might be another matter, but my SSN is no more harmful to me than my name, my phone number, my dedicated IP address, or the primary keys assigned to me in any of hundreds of databases.
So thieves you can use your IP address to sign up for credit cards and government benefits under your name? I would assume that is an extension to IPv6 I haven't heard about yet. NEATO!
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:3, Insightful)
These both compete against each other. One approach to lower the labor costs was done via illegals. And yes, it was illegal to do so. The other approach to lowering it is to send the work to places not long with lower labor costs, but that will fix their money to being artificially lower and will subsidize the work.
The other approach is to automate it. That is what the west, esp. America USED to do. Sadly, over the last decade, congress and the admin pushed tax laws to help ship jobs elsewhere, while the rest simply ignored companies hiring illegals.
If Obama takes action dealing with illegals AS WELL AS dealing with China's illegal actions and other nations that fix their money to ours, then perhaps we will get back our manufacturing.
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:3, Insightful)
Police are part of the general welfare which *everyone* benefits from, therefore everyone shares the bill. Same with mail service or an army.
Buying Fat Dave a new car (think "cash for clunkers") is *specific* welfare, and only benefits Dave. Therefore the burden should be shouldered by Dave alone, not be his neighbors. ----- It's also worth noting that no place was Congress ever granted the power to buy cars (or in 1700s parlance: wagons) for people. Such a power, if it exists at all, is reserved to the State government by our 9th and 10th amendment rights.
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:3, Insightful)
.
The answer, of course, comes down to a utilitarian argument: That communal property often leads to Tragedy of Commons situations, and so most people are better off in a society with strong property "rights" then one without one. But this has nothing to do with "liberty". It's a technocratic calculation, and one that can be subject to disagreement(Property rights are not always a good thing! There's we don't give people the right to declare no-fly zones...) It's in exactly the same class of decisions as whether or not people should be given universal health care or protected from starvation.
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the fable. Any "right" that comes from society can be taken back, and that means it certainly isn't a right.
Rights require recognition from society, but that's not where they come from. Yes, people can violate your rights, but the fact that they don't violate them doesn't mean they are the source.
Rights change over time, as society dictates.
Then they aren't rights, they are privileges.
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:2, Insightful)
Then when you get cancer you're fucked-
HINT:
We're ALL fucked.
We're ALL going to be wormfood.
What difference does it make if you die of cancer at age 80, or like my grandma, get chemo and postpone the cancer until age 84. In the end, we're all fucked.
Why don't people get this? Are they in denial?
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:3, Insightful)
Um, by that explanation, being able to hire cheap immigrant labor in this country was the only thing that partially mitigated the tide of manufacturing moving overseas. Without that, the only source of cheap labor would have been overseas. So they either use immigrants, or the factor itself has to emigrate.
You are fundamentally right in one respect though: The only way to get our manufacturing back is to remove the incentives for companies to manufacture overseas in places like China.
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's lots of people who get cancer at relatively young ages, get medical treatment, and live a normal lifespan. I'm sure they're all quite happy they got to live an extra 50 years or so instead of just giving up and dying. If you want to kill yourself when you have a health problem (whether it's cancer or a finger cut, because after all, that could get infected), then go ahead. The rest of us prefer health care to get the most life possible.
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:2, Insightful)
Tell you what:
We'll give our land back to the Native Americans, when you Europeans give back your land to the Native Europeans (Celts). That's right. Eject the Franks, the Dutch, Norsemen, Roman descendents and all the rest, and restore the land to the Celtics.
What's that? You're not responsible for Julius Caesar's actions when he invaded Celtic territory? You're not responsiblity for the Frankish/Germanic/Anglo-Saxon hordes that later invaded the same territory circa 400 A.D.? Hmmm. Well likewise I'm not responsible for what happened several centuries, so let's stop the nonsense.
The Romans came. They saw. They conquered the Celts. Then the Franks/Germans/Angles came, saw, and conquered the Romans. The the Franks/German/Angles invaded the new world and conquered those people their too.
This is life.
Stop crying over spilled milk.
We live in the present. The sons/daughters are not responsible for the sins of the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfathers/mothers.
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, rights absolutely come from society. That is the only place they can come from. You can claim "god", "the creator" or "they just are", but in reality what you're talking about is the social mores of the people in that era. As such they can change with the beliefs of the people.
Here's an exercise for you- you claim they don't come from society. Then where do they come from? Because they sure as hell don't come from nature, and there's nowhere else they *can* come from.
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:4, Insightful)
They tried. We had better weapons, for the most part.
On slippery slopes (Score:3, Insightful)
It's called a slippery slope for a reason. It could happen and perhaps it is not all that unlikely.
We already have a national ID (Score:2, Insightful)
I got mine using a photo ID (state drivers license), birth certificate, Social Security Card, and alternate photo.
It's called a Passport.
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:2, Insightful)
Rights are an ephermal idea with no basis in nature.
Rights are no more ephemeral than instincts. The Greeks developed this philosophy ~2300 years ago, and based it upon a simple argument: If you cage a human, will they be happy? No. They will try to escape. They have an instinct to be free - it is an innate natural trait or right of being a homo sapiens. (This was later proved with Spartacus who had no education, but knew he had a right to be free.)
The Greeks also argued you own what nature has given you. i.e. Your body. And the product of your body's labor, such as grabbing a fallen tree and carving it into a boat. i.e. Possessions. And so on.
Rights come from nature. You can no more separate a human from his rights than you can separate him from his heart (at which point he ceases to be). They are instinctual and innate.
Now go study philosophy.
The Problem Here... (Score:5, Insightful)
...is more government power. Once the national ID is in place it will be expanded. First ID, then driver's license, then credit card, then key card, and so on, and it will not be long before the United States government has a record of everything you buy, every place you enter or leave, every place you can enter, and, eventually, everything you do or say. This is not a slippery slope argument because we are already far down that slippery slope sliding on our asses at bewildering speed to the rocks at the bottom. Picture yourself living in a world where everything you do or say or possibly, not too long hence, even think, is being continuously monitored by the almighty government. This isn't just a conspiracy theory any more. It's a policy. A $500 ticket every time your car drifts a couple of miles an hour over the speed limit, spot checks scanning your (effectively naked) body for weapons or contraband, not just at airports but lots of other places that "need security", the government monitoring your fat intake, your cholesterol level, how well your kidneys function, how much nicotine is in your blood. Don't think so? Socialized medicine is all the excuse needed to directly regulate everything you eat, everything you drink, every product you ingest, rub on, carry.
We live in a country with literally millions of pages of laws, rules, regulations, and requirements that apply to every citizen. Now picture what it will be like when the government is finally able to completely enforce every single tiny, seemingly inconsequential rule, law, regulation, or requirement that's on the books. Tell me how anyone will be able to get through a day without being cited for multiple violations of laws that you can't even know exist because no one can read that much material.
I'm sorry. That's not a free country. That's not America. That's not what our forefathers wanted to leave for their posterity. And it's no place I want to live. So where will we be able to go, those of us who still want freedom or privacy or the right to make decisions for ourselves? Why do any of you even want to live in such a country? Make no mistake. That is where Obama is going to end us up. If he's elected to a second term, you will see all of the above put into place.
And Congress did not "give us" the right to medical care. Rights are intrinsic to each and every person, they cannot be granted and when they are taken away there is tyranny. Rights are negative things, we need them so we can stop other people from doing things to us that we don't like. When you turn a right around and make it a positive thing, like the "right of medical care" then you also put into place a requirement of service from someone else to implement that right. You're "right" then enslaves that person. That's not freedom. And that's a fact.
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:3, Insightful)
And if I ever live in one of those states I intend to donate to any politician who attempts to fix that hideously broken law.
Do yourself a favor and stay in your current state of residence.
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:3, Insightful)
As a Mexican, I'm not so much worried about the flow of illegal emigrants to the US as I'm worried about the flow of US weapons to Mexico (we have gun control you know?). What I mean is, you could do much more for the immigration problems of your country if you took as much care about what goes out of your country as you care about what goes into it.
Not that you and me have much say in this, the can of worms is already open.
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why?
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm assuming you're approaching this from a US centric point of view. If not, please ignore.
From a U.S point of view the courts have made it VERY clear that the police, and the state in general do NOT have a duty to protect you (they should, and most try, but it is not a requirement). To quote
" But there is no constitutional right to be protected by the state against being murdered by criminals or madmen. It is monstrous if the state fails to protect its residents against such predators but it does not violate the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment or, we suppose, any other provision of the Constitution. The Constitution is a charter of negative liberties; it tells the state to let people alone; it does not require the federal government or the state to provide services, even so elementary a service as maintaining law and order." (Bowers v. DeVito, 1982) see http://ftp.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F2/686/686.F2d.616.80-2078.80-1865.html [resource.org], paragraph 6.
To continue. The state "... does not have an affirmative duty to protect individuals from private third parties" (Gonzales vs. City of Castle Rock, 2004).
If you really want an eye opener on just what the state can get away with not doing in regards to the protection of a private citizen, read the Gonzales vs. Castle Rock opinion. It's read that sounds like a bad "B" movie.
The key part of the Bowers decision, in regards to your argument is "...it does not require the federal government or the state to provide services, even so elementary a service as maintaining law and order" (Bowers v. DeVito, 1982). This doesn't (in my opinion) invalidate your argument, but you'll be hard pressed to argue that a service is, in of itself, a right, rather than a privilege.
One last point, you *DO* have the right "to not be killed by random strangers", but, as the court noted, it is up to you to claim that right. You can have Life, Liberty, and Happiness, but it's up to you to do what is necessary, within the confines of our society, to exercise those rights.
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:3, Insightful)
First off your cage idea is just wrong. People can quite easily get used to lack of freedom- in fact people who've been released from jail have a difficult time adjusting to the world outside. Some even commit a crime to get recomitted.
Using philosophy as an argument for this is silly- you can argue two opposite points using philosophy and both sides caqn be absolutely right. There is no right and wrong in philosophy, there's merely consistent and inconsistent.
If rights came from nature, violating them would be physically impossible. Since it obviously isn't, they must come from another source. Furthermore if rights really came from nature, all societies would have the same idea of what those rights are. They don't. For a trivial example, look at China.
Rights come from the society, and are shaped and decided by the beliefs of the people in that society. Anything other than that is either rabble rousing rhetoric or a fable meant to indoctirnate the young.
Please note that this doesn't mean rights are bad, worthless, or not worth fighting for. On the contrary, they're a useful way to state the principles of your government. Picking different rights will cause different socio-economic results that will result in more or less stable future societies. And there's definitely a set of rights that I think should be universal, because I think they make life better. Many of them we probably share- freedom of speech for example. But they aren't natural- they're formed by society, and many functioning societies don't have them.
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:5, Insightful)
And frankly, I'd rather not have my tax dollars going to paying for the errors and duplication of effort that come from not having a single, reliable personal ID.
So, you would rather have your tax dollars paying for the errors and bad assumoptions that come from having a single overly trusted id instead.
Life is never so simple as you appear to believe. There will never be such a thing as a "single, reliable personal ID" - for a whole host of reasons. Chief among them is that having just one ID is like having one big lock between the fraudsters and piles of money. Figure out how to forge that ID that everyone thinks is reliable and BAM they are in the promised land of fraud.
That duplication of effort you don't like? That's security and efficiency. Having application-specific IDs makes the system more secure because (a) a lot less people are going to be trying to forge each one - think 50 different driver's licenses versus one, that's 50 times the expertise required from the same number of forgers. (b) requiring multiple ids for certain high-value authentications makes those forgeries even harder while low value authentications don't need some uber-id, they just need to provide a reasonable level of confidence.
And don't forget (c) - unintended consequences - one id to rule them all means one key for every single database. That puts a handle on your entire life that anyone with malicious intent can grab ahold of and yank on. There is no need for me to have the same identity at the bank, at the grocery where I use a credit card, at the DMV, at my job, at the nighclub, etc. All of those places just need to authenticate me in their limited domain - the bank needs to know that I am the same person taking money out who puts money in, the grocery store just needs to know that I am the authorized user of my credit card, the DMV just needs to know that I am qualified to drive with no legal sanctions against it, my job only needs to know that I'm the same guy they interviewed, the nightclub only needs to know that I'm of legal age to drink alcohol and that they haven't kicked me out in the past, etc.
None of those organizations need to know what the other organization knows about me. But put everything under one number and you can count on them either sharing that information for their profit - not yours or my benefit - at the very least boxing all the info up in a database that they sell access to ala credit reporting agencies gone wild. And this isn't some chicken-little thing - DMVs have routinely sold their databases to companies who resell it to anyone willing to pay. That's despite cases like "My Sister Sam" where an actress had a stalker who pulled her DMV info to find her house, walked up to her door and shot her in the face, killing her dead. As it is today, any PI or other motivated individual can pull up a buttload of personal information on you for a couple of hundred dollars.
The solution isn't some gargantuan mess of privacy laws either - laws that will require tons of overhead for compliance, and can easily be changed at the whim of a panicked congress or just outright ignored by criminals. The solution is to stop trying to centralize identity. Leave it the fuck alone. Let each group do what it needs to do authentication the people it needs to authenticate, and no more.
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:2, Insightful)
Because I believe in the right to life. And stealing a few hundred dollars worth of stuff isn't sufficient provocation to be worth taking theirs. They're assholes and deserve to go to jail, but they don't deserve to die. Now change the circumstances slightly- if they're threatening your family, or if they have a weapon and you're afraid they'll use it for example- and then I think its justified. But mere theft isn't enough. His right to life trumps your right to your stuff. There are lesser amounts of force that would be justified however- physically attacking him. Using non-lethal weapons, such as pepper spray, taser, etc. Maybe even a baseball bat to the legs, so long as you stop at a broken bone and don't beat the shit out of him with it. But not shooting him. Threatening with a gun maybe, but the problem with threatening with a gun is that if he calls your bluff you have no choice but to shoot him or retreat (which may not be possible)- its better to just attack with non-lethal weapons.
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:3, Insightful)
This reminds me of back when I was in the environmental non-profit world about fifteen years ago. Greenpeace was on the warpath about chlorine and was making noises about demanding that chlorine be banned. Some of the young paladins on staff mention it one day to the boss, who happened to have a PhD in engineering. The boss pointed out that industry uses chlorine because it's chemically reactive. If we banned chlorine, they'd find something else that was reactive to take its place. In all probability that thing would have all the drawbacks of chlorine. It might even be worse.
"Never," the boss says, "talk about banning anything until you know what's going to replace it."
That's how I feel about a national ID card. If we *don't* have a national ID card, what will the government obtain to do the things it wants a national ID card for?
I'll give you one suggestion: biometrics. Instead of "papers please" it's "thumb please," or "iris please." Worse yet, consider the possibilities of face scanning. It can be integrated with moderate success with surveillance cameras. Now nobody is asking you for anything. Your ID is being taken without your consent or perhaps without your knowledge, and filed away in a database. Furthermore once the government relies upon this system they will believe in it. That means if the system has a false positive ID match near the next terrorist bombing, they'll put you on the watch list and there may be nothing you can do to get yourself off it, because you don't know *why* you were put on the list.
Conservatives focus on the indignity of "papers please", and maybe that is an indignity, but is it less of an indignity if you don't know it's going on? Isn't it more of an indignity that you've lost the ability to detect when government is demanding your ID? Your movements could be tracked through a network of surveillance cameras. It's not quite the same as having the secret police follow you; it's worse. They don't have to follow you, they can just piece it all together from your cell phone signal and biometrics then pull a transcript of your activities from a database, correlating it with the activities of your associates or persons of interest to the security apparatus.
What? (Score:2, Insightful)
Rights do too exist (Score:4, Insightful)
Rights are an aspect of reality and apply to individuals.
If you lived as an isolated individual, you would have to build shelter, make tools, hunt and gather for food. No other person would be there to stop you. You would be free to preserve your life and well-being; you would be free to take the actions you saw fit to take; you would be free to keep the shelter, tools, and food that you produced. The only thing you would have to worry about would be animals, and the vagaries of nature.
When people choose to live together, they can recognize what it means to live as a human being, and apply that to a social setting. The rights to life, liberty, and property are the recognition of the life of a human individual in society with other human individuals.
People could live in close proximity, and wantonly steal or kill one another, but that's not society. That's living like animals.
Society cannot invent rights, only recognize them; government cannot grant rights, only protect them. Rights exist apart from society and government, and their existence is definite and specific.
If the social mores of a group of people reflect something other than life, liberty, and property -- so much the worse for them. What they're perpetuating has nothing to do with rights. Moreover, what they're perpetuating is something less than a human society.
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:2, Insightful)
Borders and nations are artificial, man-made. They enforce a low-brow, low-IQ "us vs. them"' mentality and thus belong in the dark ages.
Let's see how fast this gets modded down as a troll.
Re:This ought to be good (Score:3, Insightful)
Why the reboot?
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't file a claim with my auto insurance company every time I need to change the oil, get a car wash, get new tires, or replace a broken CV axle. I pay for it myself, and it's cheap (actually, dirt cheap because I do it myself). So why should I have some giant insurance company that I have to go through every time I visit a doctor for an annual check-up or an ingrown toenail or whatever?
That's because your car isn't insured against breakdowns. If you paid monthly for breakdown insurance, the warranty company would be smart to throw in monthly oil changes and build it into the price. That way, you'd be much more likely to get that basic maintenance done, and ultimately their repair bills would be lower. And the reason you go through the "giant insurance company" is that doctors have colluded to charge you three or four times as much if you go in uninsured. That's why that doctor's visit with the $20 copay will cost you between $60 and $240 if you go in uninsured--and that's just for the checkup.
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Borders and nations are artificial, man-made. They enforce a low-brow, low-IQ "us vs. them"' mentality and thus belong in the dark ages.
Let's see how fast this gets modded down as a troll.
Really? I thought borders were to show where one government's laws end and another's begin. You know, there are governments that will force you to pray five times a day, by killing you and your family if you don't, right? Provided that those governments exist at the will of the people, I'm OK with that. But where does that government no longer have the right to force YOU to pray to Allah five times a day?
I bet it's a border.
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? Because diseases are communicable. And because keeping people healthy benefits everyone. And because it's the morally correct thing to do.
My former roommate was an ER nurse. At one of her jobs, she was the only nurse who spoke Spanish and, as such, treated a lot of the illegal immigrants that came in. She would complain to no end about how these people would come in with some gaping wound and only after treating that wound would she figure out that six other maladies including symptoms consistent with TB. Until she quit the job, she was taking a TB test a least once a month.
The thing is, when people don't have health care, they'll put off going to the doctor until it's unavoidable. Meanwhile, they're walking petrie dishes that interact with the rest of us and help spread disease. And by the time they do come in, their problems are worse and more expensive to fix than they would have been if they'd come in when they first noticed a problem. Sure, we'll attempt to bill them, but it's an almost futile effort. Unless we're ready to accept a health care system where people are denied emergency care unless they've got insurance, there's no way around this. If health care is universal and free, they'll get treated as soon as possible whenever they have something wrong.
Also, even though these people are likely doing menial work, keeping them healthy means they can continue to do that menial labor and we all benefit from that.
Lastly, some of us want to live in a world that's more compassionate than the selfish world that's typically the result of free-market ideals. If I'm fortunate enough to earn a comfortable living and others are not, I want to do my part to help them enjoy a more comfortable life. Not to the extent communism takes things, since that removes the incentive to work hard and try to improve your life, but defining a minimum standard of life to which everyone is entitled is not a bad thing. And I view access to health care as part of that minimum standard of life that I think everyone should have.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:3, Insightful)
There are also governments that will take your money at gunpoint and give it to other people on the condition that you are more productive than they are.
Re:What? (Score:3, Insightful)
It stops being a compassionate act when we're forced to do it by government.
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hispanics aren't pure native american. They're also descendants of immigrants from Spain and Portugal and such.
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well said. Fact is, when some one is hurt the first thing EMS responders do is help the person, not check their ID. This card won't change that, or do folks think that we should wait on starting CPR or stopping bleeding until after we find their card and make sure that the government says it's ok to help these people? The law says we help every one, it doesn't say to let them die because they are not supposed to be in this country. With that in mind, the card changes nothing, except make it simpler for folks to keep track of people that may want to complain about having people always looking over their shoulders. Now, change the law so that it says no card and you get no help, then it would make a diff, but until then it is for tracking purposes only. Heck, I'm a white male with roots in the US going way back, and /I/ have a harder time getting health care then the illegal immigrants. This card isn't going to help the US, a country founded on freedom. It will help the folks that think every one needs to be tracked and watched because they may dare to think differently. I can't help but notice that our parents and grandparents lived quite well with out all this extra security and protections. They had planes, bombs, guns, drugs and all that other stuff for a long time and some how we survived. I don't believe that the world has suddenly become so much more of a danger that we need all this crap. Want to live in fear, fine with me. But it's time to wake up and tell folks to stop insisting that every one live in fear. It's the same world you lived in as a child, and your parents lived in all the way back. There have always been risks, there always will be risks. Use that brain a bit and chances are you'll be just fine.
Re:What? (Score:2, Insightful)
When the government forces you to do something against your will, it is not compassion.
There is another point... The government of the USA is by the people. It is not some deity (though, they'd like that). The government cannot be compassionate, period. The people can.
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:3, Insightful)
My house in NC was broken into at least 3 times. They cut the phone wires, they broke 3 doors worth of locks. I lost my washer and dryer, all my garden equipment, all of the records, tapes, CDs, computer equipment, stereo equipment and they even took a cheap wall clock and couch!
The damage that they did to my house was in the thousands. The material things that they took were in the tens of thousands. Insurance didn't cover but a fraction of it. I'm not angry.
What they did take was 20 years of memories and my awards and achievements for serving America as a member of the United States Air Force. That is what really hurt. For twenty years I defended the rights of Americans to freely worship, demonstrate, practice liberty and all the little things that make up America, only to have petty thieves steal the few mementos that I had for all my efforts.
I wish I could have been there to greet them as they broke down the door a second time with my 12 gauge (they took that too), cocked and loaded with 00 buckshot. To hell with them! I pray that there is a deity and he has a special hell for those people that destroyed my property, robbed me of my material possessions, caused me unwarranted mental anguish and took from me my piece of mind and belief that all humans are equal.
Those people aren't human, those inhuman bastards are lower than dirt, they're scum, there is no justification for their very existence. When I hear about how others stood their ground, or utilized castle law, I cheer.
You may mod me down now, thanks!
Re:What? (Score:3, Insightful)
You say it as if there is something wrong with that. Sorry, you owe your success and productivity to the society that allowed you to come into existence and be successful and productive, and you are going to pay back into that society and to future generations and to the less fortunate. Ideally everyone would do this willingly, but, well there are too many people like you for that to work.
Re:What? (Score:3, Insightful)
I owe my succes and productivity to working harder than I have to, and spending less than I make. If these things are penalized, I will work only the minimum I can get away with, and die as deep in debt as possible. My community benifits from my work and from my honesty. If you try to force me to "pay back" in other ways, you will fail (because I'll just stop working hard and living responsibly if such actions hurt me), and the community will benefit less, not more, from my work.
That's just a fundamental problem. If you want to advocate socialism, you have to provide an answer to this. If you want to maximize my contribution to the community, you are better served by encouraging me to work hard at what I'm good at. Transfer of earnings does nothing to increase total productivity of the community, and often reduces it.
Personally, I think the freedom to keep what one ears is quite valuable, but even if you don't, surely you want everyone to be better off, not everyone to be equally poor?
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
I do provide an answer. I can provide dozens of successful nations working as I described, and working well. You'll find them in Europe and Asia (not China, think Japan or South Korea). It's been proven to my satisfaction that the way you describe things working is false in practice, and that collecting taxes and using that to provide a minimum standard of living and safety net (things such as universal health care and education) for the worst off in society is a better way to run things. Moreover, it's the morally superior way to do things, as it recognizes the humanity and dignity of everyone, not just the wealthy or the lucky.
Re:This ought to be good (Score:3, Insightful)
I wish more people understood even the basic idea of states' rights, but this fundamental principle of "the Unites States" sounds like some libertarian kook idea to so many.
Dammit, let Califoria do stuff that Texans find crazy, with the highest taxes rates in the country and still spending themselves into bankruptcy. Let Texas do stuff that Californians find crazy, with it's deregulated power grid and laws against buying beer on Sunday mornings. And let people move freely to the states that seem best to them. It's an awesome system, and one we seem to have abandoned in favor of strong central authority.
Re:And what's the problem here? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no duty to warn the intruder or use less than lethal force
Bonkers.
Pretty much every British person is proud of their National Health Service and their unarmed police.
A significant amount of Americans foam at the mouth at the thought of not being able to take a gun into Starbucks or the thought of providing health care to someone unable to pay.
Bonkers.