Tumbled Logic

ID Cards

I posted this on a mailing list, but I figured I’d stick it on here, too.

This is not an instruction manual for politicians.

Yeah, but there are ways of doing it. Rather than make it compulsory, you make it voluntary, but “encourage” more and more services to treat it as the primary form of ID. Then some of those services start accepting it as the only form of ID. Then you pass a law which states that they’re compulsory for anybody with a criminal record, or works with children, or aeroplanes, or any other ‘high-risk’ category. Then you make it so the unemployed must have them to receive benefits. You do it when unemployment’s at a low point, though, so the actively voting electorate don’t give a crap. Then you creep it in as a requirement for other forms of benefits—tax credits, housing benefit, council tax rebates. All the while, you gradually ramp up the number of things which relate back to your entry on the register (and thus to each other). By the time you’ve done all of that (over the course of 10-15 years), it’s still technically voluntary, but it’s such an utter hassle to opt out of the system that only the people who nobody cares about bother to do it.

It’s all a bit more trivial than I’d like.