Is there supposed to be a restricted demographic with a monopoly on identification? The overwhelming majority of Americans have one. Even the large majority of any given minority group does. And if this is a legitimate concern it could be mitigated by, for example, making it free to get a state ID. Address whatever prevents some people from having one, instead of not requiring it.
But also, isn't your disaster scenario the thing that happens in a democracy regardless? Majority rule when you're the minority.
What you're left with is the fairness argument: It's supposed to be one person, one vote. But that's the argument the proponents of voter ID make.
Have you read the rest of the discussion, or at least the comments higher up the chain?
> Is there supposed to be a restricted demographic with a monopoly on identification? [...] mitigated by, for example, making it free to get a state ID.
We were talking about how many ostensibly free resources, rights and welfare are gated behind paperwork and bureaucracy. The discussion was exactly about just making something free is only a small part; and most of the time money isn't even the biggest hurdle for poor people.
I don't have too strong of an opinion on voter id laws. (I grew up in Germany where approximately everyone a government ID, and you need it for voting. And that seems to work ok. And the US system of mostly not requiring voter ID also seems to work ok.) But despite my lack of opinion on whether those laws are good or not, I can understand that just making ID cost $0 misses most of the hurdles in practice.
But isn't that the point? You have to address the other hurdles too.
For most benefits programs that is still going to be necessary even if you remove means testing, because some kind of identification would be necessary to keep someone from claiming the benefit an unlimited number of times. Which is the same as the problem with voting.
Singapore has an ingenious system to ration the amount of subsidies you get on hospital bills without any bureaucracy. The basic idea is that when you go for a hospital stay, you get to pick how much extra creature comforts you are getting, like your own private room vs an open word with many beds. The copay for the fancier options rises 'progressively' enough, that the absolute amount of government subsidy goes down. People tend to self-sort voluntarily.
The medical care you receive is the same for any of the options.
I can imagine an argument that this is somehow against the dignity of poor people to put them into comparatively crowded wards, and that everyone should get the same treatment (like eg the British NHS does, modulo the option to go to a private hospital for enough money). But I suspect many of the poorer people are happier to put up with that 'indignity' than with paperwork and privacy-invading bureaucratic means testing.
In total, adding up private and public expenditures, Singapore spends about half as much on healthcare as a proportion of GDP than the UK does, which spends about half as much as the US. Medical outcomes are no worse in the cheaper systems.
That works for medicine because nobody wants two appendectomies. But plenty of people would want a second apartment, an unlimited amount of subsidized food they could resell, another UBI or social security payment etc. Then everyone backs up their truck to fill it with a fungible commodity being offered below the market price.
The biggest problem with most of these things isn't that they require ID, it's that they require means testing. Showing your ID is, I mean, you take it out of your pocket. We could make one sufficiently easy to get and then it works for everything.
But if you also have to show that you're currently unemployed but previously made an amount of money within the eligibility threshold but haven't been unemployed for more than six months to collect unemployment and then show that you don't have investment income more than some other amount to get food assistance and then show that your household income is below some other threshold to get housing assistance etc. etc., that's a hot mess.
The sensible thing to do is replace all of said mess with a UBI, which doesn't require means testing and so doesn't require all of that paperwork. But it still requires something basic to keep you from getting more than one.
You can give out welfare without id or means testing: just require people to hang out in a specific place, and give them eg five dollars each hour.
It's a terrible wast of people's time, but it solves the specific problem.
> The sensible thing to do is replace all of said mess with a UBI, which doesn't require means testing and so doesn't require all of that paperwork.
Yes, though instead of saying that UBI doesn't require means testing, I would say that a UBI folds the means testing of the tax system and the welfare system into one, and then decides on the net payment (constant UBI - taxes) that you get.
At least that point of view makes sense for something like personal income taxes. If most of your tax take comes from VAT or land value taxes, this framing is less useful.
> You can give out welfare without id or means testing: just require people to hang out in a specific place, and give them eg five dollars each hour.
You can do this, but is that supposed to be less burdensome than requiring ID?
> Yes, though instead of saying that UBI doesn't require means testing, I would say that a UBI folds the means testing of the tax system and the welfare system into one, and then decides on the net payment (constant UBI - taxes) that you get.
That's fine from a theoretical perspective, but the practical point is that it doesn't require separate means testing paperwork for the transfer payment.
> At least that point of view makes sense for something like personal income taxes. If most of your tax take comes from VAT or land value taxes, this framing is less useful.
Only in the sense that it would remove the means testing whatsoever.
If you look at the effective rate curve of a flat tax - UBI, it's quite progressive and can be made arbitrarily so by adjusting the tax rate and the amount of the UBI. And this is in fact the preferred way to do it, because phase outs for existing benefits programs are often higher than tax rates paid in higher tax brackets, especially when combined with a lower but still non-zero tax rate at low to middle income levels.
Switching to a flat combined tax-and-phase-out rate would be no less and possibly more progressive than the existing system, while also being vastly simpler and require no means testing paperwork or privacy-invasive income tracking of any kind.
