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US Lawmakers Eyeing National ID Card
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."
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.
"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%.
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.
This being MY country and MY birthright, fuck them.
So which boat did your ancestors come in on?
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.
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.
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.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
You really ought to learn to argue this in a way that doesn't reek of xenophobia. There *are* legitimate criticisms of uncontrolled immigration, but when you argue it on the basis of "I've got mine" you turn people off. Immigration is still useful; this country, like most countries, is a Ponzi scheme of a sort. Without immigration our population would contract and the whole scheme would collapse. Limited, legal immigration maintains the necessary population growth while allowing time for services and infrastructure to expand to support the additional load. Unlimited immigration could mean overwhelming the existing systems before they have time to adapt. Striking a balance is important, but your xenophobia causes knee jerk opposition to your argument.
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...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.
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.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
To be fair most of that was an accident. (Our diseases did the vast majority of the killing.) And you are actually completely wrong. We killed off all the native americans? Than where are all Hispanics in the world coming from? Are they magic ninjas? O no wait they are native Americans or at least their distance cousins.
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.
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.
simon