identity cards
Today's top BBC news item (well last night actually) was identity cards. Tony Blair is pushing ahead with them, and others say they are dangerous, useless, expensive, etc. Under the present system that is quite right.
- Do you trust your rulers to know everything about you?
- Can they find out everything without it being ridiculously expensive?
- Can they do it without making a lot of errors?
The answer to all three is probably "no." And yet we do trust some people in this regard:
- Most of us like living in families, even though families give us very little privacy
- Most of us choose to work for employers, even though employers can read our work emails and have cameras everywhere (if they wish)
- Most of us would love to live in a little village where everyone knows everyone else - as long as they were all people like us - sometimes rich people try to recreate this with gated communities
The fact that people (rightly) oppose identity cards is proof that we (rightly) do not trust our own society. That is a serious problem. What is the solution? That will be discussed in more detail on another day. But the main points are summarized on the land rent web site.
posted by Chris Tolworthy at 8:12 AM
3 Comments:
I haven't read through your "Land Rent" web site completely yet, but I think you are missing the role of consent. In the case of families and small communities, people have consented to the loss of privacy in order to realize personal gain. In the case of national id's, people are coerced to give up their privacy in order to realize nationalistic/bureaucratic gain. There is little or no personal gain. Until the personal gain outweighs the very real risks to privacy, there will be not be public support for national id card measures.
Yes! Exactly! That is the whole point! (Jumps up and down in excitement.) Our current political systems rely on coercion at every level, and ID cards would be no different. The web site explains how a land rent system would lead to government WITHOUT coercion.
Eh..Chris, does that mean I get a gold star? ;)
I'm going to load my dishwasher and then hold my youngest so he can fall asleep. While doing that, I promise to read over your land rent web site so I can follow along. :)
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