The "mission creep" of ID instruments happens naturally when the ID has utility, when it identifies you beyond the narrow needs of relating to a government. You need a driver's license for many commerical transactions, same with the SSN. Just as we've seen here at the Zone when identity issues arise, some means of assuring a person's identity serves a useful function across a lot of domains, social as well as commercial and governmental. An ID card is a substitute for trust; or maybe a better way to put it is that an ID represents the certification of a third party that you are who you say you are, which is useful when we deal so often with total strangers.

Keep in mind that "rights" are a political concept, not a metaphysical one. A person slipping and falling off a cliff has no "right" to life bestowed upon him by either God or the universe.

You're dividing the world into God and science again, and missing the third domain of the human universe. Let me recast your examle of falling off a cliff: Suppose you're standing at the top of the cliff with another person, who's holding on to a railing. You start to fall, and the other person could easily grab you to prevent your fall, at no risk, being anchored to the railing. The law in the human universe is that you have a right to expect the other person to act to save you. We would despise somebody who wouldn't lift a finger to help when there's no personal risk involved; and we label as "heroes" people who risk themselves to help others. This is one of the fundamental laws of humanity that has just as much power as gravity or God's whim.

Then there's the implicit authoritarianism of your citation of the authorities "God" and "the universe". Has it occurred to you that Objectivism is simply submission to the authority of the universe? That might seem so eminently rational, until you consider the historical successes of all the humans who've defied the universe--or more properly, our dogmatic view of it--and won. Submitting to the authority of the universe is really no more powerful than submitting to the authority of God--the submission treats them as synonymous and creates passivity and dependence.

I agree that in the vast majority of societies in history, some people have always been "more equal" than others.

I didn't say that, and it's substantively different from what I did say. The phrase "some are more equal than others" refers to a covert elite in the context of a theoretically classless society; it implies deception. The practice of all modern societies of categorizing people is very different, not least because it's overt. That's the problem in terms of Liberal/Libertarian belief: Unequal treatment under the law. Unlike the covert elite, which one might at least excuse as a sign of meritocracy, governmental categorization of people involves criteria that are circumstantial and arbitrary...and not qualitatively much different than categorizing people by skin color or religious belief.

I think what happened there is that you needed to skate away from the connection I pointed out between the increased need for ID in America and the fearmongering of Republicans. The consequences of enhancing the fear of terrorism, then constructing the issue of illegal immigration on top of that fear (connecting the xenophobic dots) is that identification really has become a survival issue in America. And we owe it all to Republicans.

Just one last point. I understand the attraction of being able to opt-out of certain systems, such as ID cards. But in the real world it always opens up an opportunity to game the system. Health care provides a fine example: When people can opt-out of paying for health insurance but still receive at least emergency care on the taxpayers, the rational calculation is to save money by not paying for insurance. (Sure, that leaves out consideration of the difference in quality of care, but an awful lot of people look only at the price tag.) In the case of ID, consider the different treatment of people who sign up for "express lane" treatment at airports. The cost of processing those people is lower, yet the higher cost of processing casual travelers is shared by everyone. And, as we see time and again with such things as fast-pass toll lanes, a successful program like that has the ironic effect of reducing traffic in the ordinary lanes and making them a better value for people who won't pay for premium service.

I think George Lakoff was right about Conservatives having a much narrower perception of causality. If you think even one step beyond the simple Newtonian causality of "B follows A", you always see complexity and unanticipated consequences. Understanding the rules of the human universe provides the same tools for grasping this complexity as the quantum view provides for understanding the non-Newtonian universe. Complexity is not the same as incomprehensibility.