You honestly think there are 10s of millions of people wanting a decongestant in the United States without ID? This is ridiculous and I agree with the other commenter, a bit hyperbolic.
https://bluenotary.us/how-many-american-citizens-don-t-have-...
https://www.brennancenter.org/media/6697/download
I could easily have missed a better or more recent study, so if anyone has one please post it!
I cannot think of another significant country that hasn't had this figured out for decades.
After all, imagine if the government had a database with every person's name in it! You'd have like 300 million rows? Nobody's built a computing machine that could do that. And then how would you get the cards to people? You'd have to send out horses and buggies to every corner of the nation. And where would you find enough coachmen to do that, and roads to drive the coaches on???
No, clearly it's unpossible.
So we have to reserve the use of government IDs for really important things, like checking if you can buy cold medicine, and voting must remain insecure.
In fact, as a rule, ID is reserved for things that aren't important, because it is a point of failure.
Oh, wait, it must be the latter, because finding problems with India's government ID scheme takes five seconds: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/mar/21/n...
Identifying people is not hard, even for the poorest countries, and it's quite easy to do with modern technology. There is no good-faith reason to oppose it, any more than there is to oppose driver's licenses.
Consider for instance the people who currently exist, don't have government ID, and don't have an accurate record of their birth. Such people exist. Should they just die, or something?
It seems trite to someone in the middle class, but it genuinely is not a priority to certain demographics, given the challenge of getting it. That challenge may seem trivial to a frequenter of Hacker News, but we're a diverse society.
The only barrier to getting a decongestant should be: having the money to pay for it.
The cost of these regulations is millions, perhaps billions of dollars in extra effort, bookkeeping and security by tens of thousands of businesses, not to mention lost productivity and frustration on the part of everyone else evolved, and moats of the costs and inconvenience is borne by people outside the government, who are not committing a crime.
It’s bat shit crazy that bureaucrats are allowed to steal this much productivity from the economy.