"I am a Man, Not a Number"
A bill that allows illegal immigrants to obtain driver's licenses has now made its way through both houses of the California legislature. Proponents argue that it will ensure safer streets by increasing the insurability of people who are now driving without licenses. Opponents contend that will pose risks to national security and possibly induce major voter fraud. I don't believe that this is a state issue. Immigration is an area of the law where federal regulation "preempts" state requirements; this is why Proposition 187, which denied state-funded health and education programs to illegal aliens, was struck down. So the federal government should weigh in on whether or not a state is empowered to issue government documents to individuals who are by definition undocumented. With President Bush's desire to court the Latino vote, however, silence is more than golden for him. I don't think I've heard anyone raise the more fundamental question: why are the privileges and immunities that citizens retain under our constitutional order extended to those who are present here in contravention of immigration law?
The "increase in insurability" argument is a red herring. Expecting people who have flouted the law to act lawfully -- especially when it takes the form of a costly monthly insurance bill -- will prove to be a triumph of hope over experience. If the Democrats were really concerned about the roadway safety and getting insurance for everyone, they would resurrect the "pay at the pump" insurance scheme they proposed about a decade ago. The trouble is that such a regime would increase the per gallon price of gasoline to unforeseen heights.
Philosophically, I am for a completely open border, where people, goods and services can move freely without costly and destructive government intervention. But we have a social welfare system that ensures many individuals a veritable buffet of services that is almost wholly underwritten by those who earn income and own property under the rubric of law. It is doubtful that my position on the issue, "immigration yes, welfare no," will ever get a hearing because it presupposes that which is unthinkable -- a diminution in state power.
Ethnic minorities should be extremely wary of the state collecting data about them, whether it be for purposes of providing services or ensuring that "government be able to teach people how to drive," as Cruz Bustamante noted in last night's gubernatorial debate. If our schools can't teach children how to read, much less think for themselves, one can hardly expect it to transform people into model drivers. Government does some things well, however. To wit, what the federal government did with the "relocation" of Japanese-American citizens during World War II. This triumph of efficiency testifies to the potential wayward uses of government information; census block data enabled the Army to quickly assess what neighborhoods needed "cleaning out." In our present age of the rapid aggrandizement of the welfare-warfare state, Albert Jay Nock's Golden Rule of Sound Citizenship resonates particularly clearly: "When you give the government power to do something for you, you also necessarily give it the power to do something to you."
A short essay in The Voluntaryist, a publication devoted to the doctrine that "relations among people should be by mutual consent, or not at all," observes:
"Counting by governments has been going on for many centuries. However, it is only in recent decades that individuals in the United States have been faced with being given a government number. One historian of the public health movement observed that it was not until the federal government began disbursing Social Security checks that there was any financial incentive to have a state-issued birth certificate and federally-issued number:
"'The national Social Security Act proved to be a great stimulus to accurate birth certification. Many people never considered a birth certificate to be of any importance until old age assistance, unemployment insurance, and other ramifications of the Social Security Act demonstrated to them that it was necessary to have this official proof of their existence.' Wilson G. Smillie, Public Health Administration in The United States (3rd ed.), 1947, p. 191.
"Under the Social Security Administration rules it became important to be able to prove when you were legally entitled to receive benefits. It was not until the early 1960s that federal tax returns were required to carry an identification number. The point is that as citizen-numbering has evolved, the government has used the carrot and stick approach: get a number -- receive government largess; refuse a number -- be penalized and be ineligible to receive government benefits; refuse a number -- be excluded from many activities which may only be described as government-granted privileges (issuance of a driver's license, access to licensed-physician medical care, access to state and federally-chartered bank services, etc.). To the normal, obedient citizen receiving a number is as innocuous and innocent as being inoculated against certain diseases at birth. It also automatically puts each and every productive citizen into the position of being tracked and spied upon as the government makes sure that the citizen pays his or her taxes.
"Slavemasters desire to control everything they can and numbering systems which allow no activity to be untaxed, unrecorded, or unnoticed are important to their success in controlling their slaves and expropriating their property."
The official documentation of illegal immigrants, then, is actally a truimph of statism over everyone's liberties -- those individuals who would live free in this country without being tagged with a state-sanctioned number, and those of us who are already trapped in the system and forfeit a substantial portion of our proprety in the name of government beneficence. The only real winners when every human being is numbered and kept track of are those political actors who gleefully lord power over the citizenry "for their own good."
To paraphrase the protagonist in Edward Abbey's Lonely Are the Brave, "I don't need no papers. I know who I am."
The "increase in insurability" argument is a red herring. Expecting people who have flouted the law to act lawfully -- especially when it takes the form of a costly monthly insurance bill -- will prove to be a triumph of hope over experience. If the Democrats were really concerned about the roadway safety and getting insurance for everyone, they would resurrect the "pay at the pump" insurance scheme they proposed about a decade ago. The trouble is that such a regime would increase the per gallon price of gasoline to unforeseen heights.
Philosophically, I am for a completely open border, where people, goods and services can move freely without costly and destructive government intervention. But we have a social welfare system that ensures many individuals a veritable buffet of services that is almost wholly underwritten by those who earn income and own property under the rubric of law. It is doubtful that my position on the issue, "immigration yes, welfare no," will ever get a hearing because it presupposes that which is unthinkable -- a diminution in state power.
Ethnic minorities should be extremely wary of the state collecting data about them, whether it be for purposes of providing services or ensuring that "government be able to teach people how to drive," as Cruz Bustamante noted in last night's gubernatorial debate. If our schools can't teach children how to read, much less think for themselves, one can hardly expect it to transform people into model drivers. Government does some things well, however. To wit, what the federal government did with the "relocation" of Japanese-American citizens during World War II. This triumph of efficiency testifies to the potential wayward uses of government information; census block data enabled the Army to quickly assess what neighborhoods needed "cleaning out." In our present age of the rapid aggrandizement of the welfare-warfare state, Albert Jay Nock's Golden Rule of Sound Citizenship resonates particularly clearly: "When you give the government power to do something for you, you also necessarily give it the power to do something to you."
A short essay in The Voluntaryist, a publication devoted to the doctrine that "relations among people should be by mutual consent, or not at all," observes:
"Counting by governments has been going on for many centuries. However, it is only in recent decades that individuals in the United States have been faced with being given a government number. One historian of the public health movement observed that it was not until the federal government began disbursing Social Security checks that there was any financial incentive to have a state-issued birth certificate and federally-issued number:
"'The national Social Security Act proved to be a great stimulus to accurate birth certification. Many people never considered a birth certificate to be of any importance until old age assistance, unemployment insurance, and other ramifications of the Social Security Act demonstrated to them that it was necessary to have this official proof of their existence.' Wilson G. Smillie, Public Health Administration in The United States (3rd ed.), 1947, p. 191.
"Under the Social Security Administration rules it became important to be able to prove when you were legally entitled to receive benefits. It was not until the early 1960s that federal tax returns were required to carry an identification number. The point is that as citizen-numbering has evolved, the government has used the carrot and stick approach: get a number -- receive government largess; refuse a number -- be penalized and be ineligible to receive government benefits; refuse a number -- be excluded from many activities which may only be described as government-granted privileges (issuance of a driver's license, access to licensed-physician medical care, access to state and federally-chartered bank services, etc.). To the normal, obedient citizen receiving a number is as innocuous and innocent as being inoculated against certain diseases at birth. It also automatically puts each and every productive citizen into the position of being tracked and spied upon as the government makes sure that the citizen pays his or her taxes.
"Slavemasters desire to control everything they can and numbering systems which allow no activity to be untaxed, unrecorded, or unnoticed are important to their success in controlling their slaves and expropriating their property."
The official documentation of illegal immigrants, then, is actally a truimph of statism over everyone's liberties -- those individuals who would live free in this country without being tagged with a state-sanctioned number, and those of us who are already trapped in the system and forfeit a substantial portion of our proprety in the name of government beneficence. The only real winners when every human being is numbered and kept track of are those political actors who gleefully lord power over the citizenry "for their own good."
To paraphrase the protagonist in Edward Abbey's Lonely Are the Brave, "I don't need no papers. I know who I am."
posted by Nikos A. Leverenz @ 3:56 PM
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