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Comment by Fargren | Hacker News Reader

This is a strawman, and plainly untrue. Many countries have mandatory id. I have personally lived in Argentina and Spain, both of them have it, for close to a century (89 years in Spain, 54 years in Argentina, but it replaced a pre-exisitng system). The Spanish DNI has RFID.

In neither place, nor any country with mandatory ID as far as I know, you get "no access to anything". The worst thing that can happen is that if the police choose to stop you, not carrying your ID can lead to you being taken to a police station temporarily. Which is not great, but not anywhere near close to what you are suggesting is inevitable. And police can detain you arbitrarily in places without state-mandated IDs, this is just a cute excuse that they can add to their repertoire.

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This doesn't sound very forward thinking to me. What might not currently be abused is, however, now in place to be abused in future.

If anything, I'm annoyed by having to have three IDs in my pocket (ID, drivers license, health insurance card) and still not being able to achieve much with them alone. There's usually some other document involved (proof of residence, birth certificate, something else).

Western Europe is one example where IDs have not been abused. But China is another example where they have been.

If you give your governments tools that can be used for oppression, even if they aren’t abused today, it would make it easier for a new authoritarian government to abuse them later on.

Spain was a dictatorship for much of the 20th century and Argentina had had multiple military dictatorships too — it could happen again. Europeans are far too confident that they have overcome the problems of the past by building the EU etc. A bit more American-style distrust of government would be a good thing.

> A bit more American-style distrust of government would be a good thing.

Nope. The American distrust is resulting in a self-fulfilling prophecy of a failing government. Your bureacracy is years behind basic things we've had in many European countries, and because there's massive distrusts there's no investment making it impossible to improve.

E.g. your tax process is a massive joke, but will it ever be fixed? Probably not soon because if nothing else, one of the only two parties claims government is by default incompetent so any money spent on it are by definition a waste.

You seem to think that Americans want a European-style society and have failed to achieve it.

We don't want it. We don't want to "fix" our tax system -- we want low taxes and lots of deductions, and that is why we have them! We want cars. We want suburbs. We don't want the government to be our mommy. This is not a failure, it is an intentional feature of the American system.

Also just remember that if we built a competent bureaucracy that enforced a nationwide ID system, it might be handed over to Donald Trump if he wins the next election, and he really could win. Every power we give the government, assuming that the government will be good, will also be given to a bad government. Sometimes it's better to refuse to give that power at all.

> We don't want it. We don't want to "fix" our tax system -- we want low taxes and lots of deductions, and that is why we have them

You can have that without having to rely on third parties you pay for to get there. How exactly does a middleman help if the point is low taxes?

> We want cars. We want suburbs

Funnily that's in direction contradiction to your previous want. Suburbs and cars are much more expensive, therefore you have to pay more for them, either in taxes to pay for the useless infrastructure, or to pay for it directly.

> Also just remember that if we built a competent bureaucracy that enforced a nationwide ID system, it might be handed over to Donald Trump if he wins the next election, and he really could win

And how exactly would someone like Trump abuse an ID system?

> Funnily that's in direction contradiction to your previous want. Suburbs and cars are much more expensive, therefore you have to pay more for them, either in taxes to pay for the useless infrastructure, or to pay for it directly.

And yet we have the infrastructure. This is not a thought experiment. I am posting this comment from a house in the suburbs with high-quality roads and utility services, which we have managed to build despite our tax system.

So where is the contradiction? Clearly it's possible to live like this, because we do now, and we have done so for a very long time.

Both of the examples I used had mandatory state IDs during their dictatorships. The IDs were not significantly instrumental to the government's power. I don't think the addition of RFID really would change that in the event of a new dictatorship.

But even if mandatory RFID IDs were a critical tool of authoritarian governments, what would prevent the dictator from issuing mandatory IDs after taking power?

First of all, during the Franco government the internet was an academic curiosity and nobody carried smartphones. That has all changed, and the tools the government has to monitor people are way beefier than they were back then. Facial recognition cameras, for example.

What prevents a dictator from issuing mandatory IDs? The resistance of the people. Yes, the government has police, and an army, and fighter jets, etc. But in the past few decades we have seen that insurgencies and popular resistance can succeed anyway -- the US got kicked out of Afghanistan and had a lot of trouble in Iraq, Ukraine is outfighting Russia despite massive disadvantages numerically and technologically, and even in China the government softened the zero-Covid program after mass protests. The people have more power than we think and can resist such things, if they want to.

All I'm saying is I don't see how the pre-existance of mandatory ID under a democratic government would be a significant boon for an eventual dictatorship. I understand that based on principle one might prefer not to have them, but to me they are really innocuous and extremely practical.

Unlike facial recognition cameras, which there's at least some political will to ban (https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-edges-closer-to-a-ban...).

>Ukraine is outfighting Russia despite massive disadvantages numerically and technologically

You are somewhat misinformed about the Ukrainian war. Ukraine has 3-4 times less population than Russia, but it started full mobilization early in the war. Meanwhile Russia started partial mobilization just recently. So it was common for the Ukranian army to have a numerical advantage on the ground. Most of the recent Russian retreats can be attributed to the lack of personnel to properly mount defensive positions.

As for technological advantage... It depends. Ukraine effectively has the whole NATO and a number of additional countries as its rear and supply base, while Russia depends only on itself and a bit on Iran. In terms of communication systems, intelligence, and likely anti-tank and anti-ship systems, the Ukrainian army is miles ahead of Russia. Russia has advantage in air, artillery, anti-air, and ground-to-ground rocket systems.

What's stopping a dictatorship from adding these things? It's very strange to assume a dictatorship would be so noble as to not add a tool for abuse, and you include the Chinese government as an example already.

Not adding it today does nothing to ensure a dictatorship cant use it in the future

> Not adding it today does nothing to ensure a dictatorship cant use it in the future

Yes it does, if the people have the will to fight. Insurgencies have been surprisingly successful against the most powerful militaries in the world in the past few decades. Even in China, the threat of mass protest forced the government to soften Covid restrictions -- and the protesters didn't even have guns, or any leverage at all except their willingness to put themselves in harm's way.

Every dictatorship that has ever existed started off with the consent of the people, at least at first. All of the dictators in history were swept into office on a wave of popularity, and the people only regretted it later on. It's just not possible to impose a dictatorship on a population that doesn't want it.

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