Papers, please.

"Papers, please."

What reaction does that phrase get from you? If, like me, you grew up watching WWII movies where the Gestapo is searching for the hero, or read spy novels during the cold war, you probably have an instinctive negative reaction.

Why? We are asked this every time you have to show your driver's license or provide your SSN ( which was not originally supposed to be for ID purposes. My card still says that. The new ones do not.) Think of all the info out there on you. And since when does the government need an ID to persecute you. Think of the IRS......or for 2nd Amendment enthusiasts, the BATFE. Or just the local police/prosecutors if you've come to their attention......

My gut feeling is that national ID is a bad idea. My brain says otherwise. I cannot decide.
Here's an article by Roger Simon that may convince you one way or another.

"We are spying on you.

No, I’m serious. Pajamas Media is spying on you, as is—assuming you have cookies enabled—nearly every other website you have visited in the last couple of years. At PJM we try to keep this snooping to a gentlemanly minimum but others, like Amazon, seem to know more about us than do our mothers. Then there are the credit card companies and the banks, the department stores and utilities and insurance companies, credit reports, stock brokers, internet providers, cable and satellite companies, the federal and state governments, social security, the IRS, Medicare and your mortuary. I could go on, but you get the point.

Privacy, to paraphrase the great Preston Sturges, is not only dead, it’s decomposed.

So what’s the big deal about a national ID card already?

...our whole country is being turned upside down by the immigration issue, a problem that cannot be resolved in any real way without knowing who is who. And we don’t. Not even close. That renders all solutions bogus, except for the one advocated by pure open border types who, it would seem, aren’t overly concerned with jihadists running around Chicago masquerading as undocumented workers from El Salvador as long as the world runs according to Milton Friedman. And it’s not just potential terrorists. We are experiencing something of a crime wave —a rise anyway— and some of that comes from illegal alien criminals who should have been in jail, ours or somebody else’s.

...A national ID card would be easier to control than the Patriot Act because it deals in public information. It is not and should not be covert.

And here’s another potential benefit of the card. Right now, we all have literally dozens of supposedly authoritative files on each of us (see the second paragraph for just a few). Many of these are inaccurate and contradictory. Ever seen your credit report? Ever tried to get it corrected? I’m not saying a national ID card would or should be fixing that, but it could consolidate a lot of basic information that would then all be in one place with a simplified process for righting mistakes. Identity theft, currently a huge problem, would also become much more difficult."

He's got a convincing argument. Perhaps we should try it on a state, first. You go first.