Why All Americans Should Carry ID Papers | Hacker News Reader

Why All Americans Should Carry ID Papers

newsweek.com

8 pointsgeorgecmu33 comments

I find all of this fuss quite humorous; the federal government has had basically the same law as Arizona on the books for nearly thirty years now. However, being the feds, they arbitrarily enforce laws as it suits them (mainly because they have so many criminal laws now that there is no way they could consistently enforce them all -- even if they press-ganged a tenth of the population into the US marshalls).

The issue here is that Arizona is deciding to enforce such an unjust law. Why is it unjust? Because it is a "positive" offense (I.E. it violates no one's natural rights) -- an offense that would not exist without government.

Traditionally, systems based on English common law restricted the punishment of "positive" offenses to fines (a tradition sadly abandoned by most Anglo nations now), regardless of whether said person was a "citizen" or not.

To be fair, the old English common law didn't have (or need) the concept of "citizenship" in the first place. Citizenship generally only enters into a society when there is special privilege associated (I.E. a leg-up on the rest of society) -- which is the main reason people are upset about "illegals", as they are partaking of pillage (aka entitlements) the citizens thought reserved unto themselves.

So what is the better alternative? Simplify the legal code, such that citizenship is irrelevant? Or have an even more complex system that requires such brutal enforcement to be held together? Or is it the one world government?

I would posit that the last two choices are inappropriate -- brutal enforcement and complex laws destroy trust in a society, while a one-world government cannot hope to meaningfully represent the diverse aims of man; it would be a sub-optimal outcome at best, and inescapable tyranny at worst.

However, no one will accept simplifying laws such that they are not an affront to justice and liberty, as those who have secured themselves entitlements and other powers will not release them without violence.

So, sorry guys. There's no solution to this problem that won't cause worse trouble down the line. To be fair, it's not like we have a choice in the matter anyways -- the only votes we ever had (or can ever have) is our money...and we gave away that control in 1913.

"As Frank Rich pointed out in a recent New York Times column, of the 35 members of the Arizona House who voted for the immigration bill, 31 voted for another law that would have barred any presidential candidate from appearing on the Arizona ballot in the next elections if he couldn't provide a birth certificate that satisfied the Arizonans' standards. So, ban Obama. But register guns with the federal government? Forget it. Too much paperwork. Too much invasion of privacy.

It's this kind of self-contradicting conservatism, bordering on lunatic libertarianism..."

Two things: 1) Libertarians are strongly against any form of national ID, and this author's casual classification of libertarians as lunatic is incredibly childish.

2) Although I agree with the author that national ID is a bad idea (TM), his comparison here is quite off the scale: the president of the united states is not only significantly more powerful than one person with a gun (he controls thousands of people with guns, and nuclear weapons). In addition, there are legal requirements for office that can be verified by a birth certificate (age among others, and I won't be debating the value of these legal requirements), whereas the federal government EXPLICITLY has no jurisdiction over gun ownership. And these are contradictory laws passed recently by a transient legislature - this is the Constitution of the United States of America. A document, without which, there is no legality of the United States.

Your second point is well taken, but your first is overreaching. He's not suggesting libertarianism is lunacy. He's suggesting that the interpretation of libertarianism that requires random people on the street to be better documented than guns is lunatic.

It seems clear that reasonable people can take either side of that argument, but the argument is reasonable only to the extent that it doesn't get reframed as "Christopher Dickey versus the Concept of Libertarianism".

The Arizona law, whether you support it or not, is about the farthest thing from libertarianism.

“A Modest Proposal” — the author's title is the strongest indication this is a parody, and not everyone will get the reference.

I've seen "modest proposals" that whose authors didn't know that they're supposed to be parodies. If my reading of Dickey's piece is on target, this is one of those cases where the author didn't know.

I'm guessing the former Bureau Chief for Paris, Cairo, and Central America for Newsweek and (before that) the Washington Post has heard of Swift before.

Dickey's not the first journalist to make this point, which, stated concisely, is that nobody would accept a law like this if it applied universally, because it would mean they could spend a night in a city jail for forgetting their wallet. They're only OK with Arizona's law because they haven't thought it through.

Dickey most certainly did know. "A Modest Proposal" was in the title to alert those who might not recognize satire, that he was dead set against all that he appeared to support. OTOH perhaps American education has declined to the point than nobody reads Swift anymore.

Interesting. I was reading it as an actual (and modest) proposal and, living in Europe, wasn't able to understand what's the deal. Carry you ID on you? Oh, sure, I've been doing that since I was 15 and never had a problem with it.

Quite a strange issue (for me), really. I like these articles pointing out interesting differences that would otherwise never occur to me. Like there might be a country where such proposal actually parodies something. :-)

You can't be arrested in the US simply for not carrying ID. Unless you're brown-skinned and live in Arizona (hence the uproar).

You can be arrested for refusing to identify yourself to a police officer, and you can certainly be arrested for driving without ID, but you aren't required to carry papers simply to walk down the street.

We like it that way.

Unless the state has a "stop and identify" statute on the books, you cannot be arrested for refusing to identify yourself.

24 states have such a statute. My new home state, California, has none.

I was a Canadian living in Seattle for a while, and I was asked to produce ID by a cop in my apartment complex. I politely asked if I was required to, he said no and asked politely again but that was the end of it.

I find if you clearly & politely ask what you are legally required to do, most cops will honestly tell you.

To clarify, you can't be convicted in the US for simply not carrying ID. You can still be effectively arrested and detained for a while with little or no recourse in many places.

You can be detained for virtually any reason, but an arrest is more serious, and requires cause. You "can be" arrested, or beaten, or held incommunicado without an attorney; like being arrested simply for not carrying identification, those things are unlawful.

You do have to identify yourself; presumably, if you're carrying ID and refuse to show it simply to be a dick, you're inviting trouble. But you'd have grounds for a complaint if you were detained and then arrested because you genuinely didn't have an ID card.

No doubt. Those who do not follow police officer instructions to produce identification, even in states without "stop and identify" statutes, will find themselves risking an obstruction charge. It may be dropped at the state/city attorney's discretion later, but it will create a very unpleasant period of time.

Case in point: http://www.seattlepi.com/local/418746_video.html

I must admit I was was caught out. Now I'm a little sad that I've been so detuned by the political climate of the day that I didn't immediately identify the satire.

In most places I've travelled, "Your papers please" is not so subtle code for "bribe me before I impose some arbitrary penalty". Except when it isn't, in which case to suggest such an accommodation results, at minimum, in a good going over and the imposition of some arbitrary penalty. Thankfully I only fly over Arizona so I'll never have to decide.

I almost never read Modest Proposals, Open Letters or Dirty Little Secrets anymore. The use of those phrases in the title tells me that the body probably won't have much original thought either.

Can we have some new cliches? These things are so last year.

First, they will have to increase the federal prison capacity 10x, so they can hold all the American citizens who rebel against this tyranny, and would gladly spend the rest of their lives in a federal prison in protest. I would be among them.

Again: the impact of this "modest proposal" is that you could be held in a city jail (note: there are jurisdictions where strip searches are standard operating procedure before being admitted into a holding cell) for nothing more than forgetting your wallet. He's not being serious.

The point is, in Arizona, this psychotic policy already has the force of law if your skin happens to be brown.

People have always been held in the city jail for not having ID when brown. Arizona has just decided to be up front about it.

This attitude presupposes that there's no substantial difference between the police unlawfully harassing people because of their race, and a bona fide law on the books inviting them to do so.

I don't believe that.

There IS no substantial difference when you're sitting in jail.

Of course I agree with that.

“In police states, this is a pretty ugly process—most often an attempt at intimidation, or extortion, or both. In democracies, it can be pretty ugly, too, and sometimes for the same reasons.”

Anyone else note the fallacy in the suggestion that police states and democracies are mutually exclusive?

I know this is a parody, but why do we, as a society, care about immigration status? We're all citizens of Earth.

If "an illegal" is obeying the law and contributing to society, they're already doing better than the 3.2% of "real Americans" in prison. So why bother them? Why do we even care?

If you read the Stratfor guy's book, we're in a delusional blip of time where stuff like this can happen. 20-30 years from now, basic demographics are going to flip the equation on it's head; we'll be begging for Mexican immigrants simply to do the day-to-day work that we'll be too old to do. Add to that our lack of population density relative to other countries, our strategic control of the continent and both oceans, and our ability to absorb a constant influx of immigrant labor (and tax base) is a huge national asset.

In the meantime we'll just have to hope that Major League Baseball can right this (social, ethical, logistical, economic) wrong.

In all cases I've seen (besides outright bigotry, which this law is) the reason people care is because of one aspect of "obeying the law" that illegal aliens can't comply with: paying income taxes.

In a nutshell that's all governments care about most: pay your taxes and you are no longer a problem.

People in lower income brackets pay very little of their income in actual income tax, and while being paid under the table also keeps them from contributing to payroll taxes, the fact that they aren't going to be claiming the benefits FICA allegedly pays for mitigates that. Meanwhile, they continue to drive whatever consumption taxes we set up --- and again, being in a lower income bracket, they pay disproportionately more in those taxes than we do.

I wouldn't be surprised to see reasonable arguments in either direction (positive or negative) about the economic impact of illegal immigration. I bet it's fuzzier than you think it is.

Illegal immigrants don't pay income taxes but their employers do contribute payroll and social security payments. Not disagreeing at all, just clarifying for non-US readers; wehave a lot of distinct taxes.

The allegation would be that most illegal immigrants are not getting W2 deductions on their wages --- that being part of the point of hiring them.

Not a lot different than my "contractor" friends that spend every waking second trying to figure out how not to pay all their 1099 taxes.

If they pay their income tax, they get deported. If they don't pay, they can stay (or maybe get deported).

The incentive structure is set up wrong.

A duplicate: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1345734

Reply on news.ycombinator.com