We currently have no national registry of who, or who isn't a citizen, and no verifiable way to tie identity to work status, or anything else.
Stuff like this is part of the price we pay for freedom I suppose.
What an odd conclusion to draw from this. Do countries with national ID's not have freedom?
See the 3rd thru 10th amendments, specifically the 3rd and 4th.
The war was as much about the question of what the powers of government ought to be as anything else.
In politics, you should never give yourself more power then you wish your opponent to have at some point in the future.
Another is, a right by executive order isn't a right.
1) Freedom of speech in the US is the most unrestricted in the world. "Hate speech" (or more accurately: whatever the current cultural consensus deems to be beyond the pale) is not an exception.
2) Protections for criminal defendants in the US are the greatest in the world:
* No other country has a hard rule that excludes all illegally-collected evidence, and legally-collected evidence flowing from illegally-collected evidence, from trial.
* More generally, we have very extensive rules of evidence that limit what can be admitted into court, to protect the rights of the criminally accused, and both sides of a civil case. The UK has similarly extensive rules, but the rest of Europe does not.
* An absolute right to trial by jury for anything greater than a petty criminal charge.
3) The right to homeschool your children. This is essentially illegal in Sweden, Germany, and some other European countries.
Other countries (such as Western Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) have weaker protections for criminal defendants during the trial, yes. But, assuming you are convicted, prison sentences tend to be shorter on average and there is no death penalty. On another point, to compare Australia to the US, the High Court of Australia has basically full appellate jurisdiction (even on state law questions) when it chooses to exercise it, whereas the US Supreme Court's jurisdiction is limited to appeals on points of federal law only, and AEDPA has limited access to federal habeas corpus. So I think the convicted have greater rights of appeal under Australian law than US law. So it isn't clear to me that criminal defendants actually have more rights under the US system overall – they have more rights prior to conviction, but less rights afterward.
How does this to relate to rights? Well, arguably one of our rights is the right to appeal adverse judicial decisions. And the Australian legal system grants more extensive rights in that area than the US one does.
For those not well-versed in law, this discussion is very misleading. Appellate courts do not retry facts, they only decide if there was an error of law in the lower court. American states retain a lot more power than Australian states do, including the right to their own common law and to apply their own judicial philosophy. To substitute the judgment of the federal courts on issues of purely state law is to abolish federalism to a large degree.
Appellate courts (at least in some systems) are allowed to reopen the facts, for example to consider new evidence not available at the time of trial - see e.g. http://www.courtofappealbc.ca/appellant-guidebook/3.5-introd...
> American states retain a lot more power than Australian states do, including the right to their own common law and to apply their own judicial philosophy. To substitute the judgment of the federal courts on issues of purely state law is to abolish federalism to a large degree.
Australian state court systems have always been subject to review by higher courts. Originally by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, and now the High Court of Australia has taken over that jurisdiction. I don't think it is reasonable to say that because we do federalism differently than the US, we don't do federalism at all.
It is also worth keeping in mind that there is a potential tension between states rights and individual rights. If a state is trying to limit my rights as an individual, and the federal government or courts wants to stop that, and "states rights" limit the ability of the federal government or courts to step in and protect my individual rights, then that is a case in which my individual rights are being sacrificed to protect "states rights". So, I'd say that in the matter of appeals, the US chooses to prioritise states rights over individual rights in a way in which Australia doesn't.
I'm not saying there's no federalism in Australia. I'm saying that the federalism is substantially limited by having one general common law to rule them all. And also by imposing a single approach to judicial decision making.
Also, I think you continue to misrepresent the situation. You have every right to appeal a violation of your federally-granted rights to the federal Supreme Court. It is only rights granted to you only by your state that cannot, generally, be appealed. As I said above, it also means that prosecutors cannot try to get a decision made for you, by a state court on the basis of state law, overturned by the federal courts. So it cuts both ways.
No denying that in the general case greater rights of appeal could work against the defendant as well as in favour of them. But in practice it all depends on how defendant-friendly the federal and individual state court systems actually are. I'm sure that for at least some US states, if the federal court system was granted Australian-style supremacy over them, the end result would be more defendant-friendly than it is now. Maybe for some other states it would be the opposite, but you have to ask which of those two situations would be the more common.
We have one of the highest crime rates in the world. If our penal system didn't work the way it did, America would descend into chaos.
That is assuming you stay alive, no? As far as I know, USA is the only developed country where a police officer killing an unarmed person doesn't even make national news.
> 3) The right to homeschool your children. This is essentially illegal in Sweden, Germany, and some other European countries.
Another way to see this is that kids in Sweden or Germany have basic right to education whose quality is certified by the government. In America, anything goes. (Whether it's good or bad is a matter of opinion, I guess...)
> They seem to have less freedom overall, theoretically
I think you accidentally forgot to type a very long and well-cited essay in between those two lines?
Kind of, though it was really more about the potential that central government would eventually act me way on one particular issue, but the side of big central government won that war. (We earlier fought a war against government without representation, but that's a different issue.)
See the 3rd thru 10th amendments, specifically the 3rd and 4th.
The question is not whether the government is federal, or more of a confederation, it was what the rights of that government, and the rights of the people ought to be.
I'm not sure how Amendments to the Constitution which replaced the Articles of Confederation provide any evidence whatsoever about the purposes of the Revolutionary War (they provide evidence of the concerns that needed to be addressed as part of the massive centralization, relative to the AoC, that the Constitution represented, but that's a whole different issue.)
Also the highest incarceration rate in the free world and an election system subject to massive corruption. But hey, no national ID is more indicative of freedom.
If ICE wouldn't accept a passport, I doubt a national ID would have helped.
That's really easy to say when you (and, honestly, I) are not the ones paying that price.
Curious, why?
There is already pervasive tracking I am afraid. Having a smartphone, social accounts, banking online, NSA running wild, face recognition tech tested in airports, traffic cameras. At this point, it seems an ID card wouldn't make much of a difference in that area. I have an ID card by being a citizen of another country, I just don't feel like I am somehow tracked more or less free because of it.
> another large federal bureaucracy that is difficult to deal with
I've seen state government being just as dysfunctional and I've seen other countries have even more bureaucratic governments. If they can do it, so can the federal government.
In a way the social security card is already a broken and terrible ID, which is misused and causes billions of dollars in waste every year. So the ID is effectively there, it's just very bad and an in need of an update.