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Comment by jujube3 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, only advanced countries like India can give everyone an ID. The US is too poor and backwards to give everyone a plastic card.

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Do you think citizens of India experience no problems as a consequence of this, or is it just too exciting to be sarcastic on the internet?

Oh, wait, it must be the latter, because finding problems with India's government ID scheme takes five seconds: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/mar/21/n...

The point of India requiring identification for benefits is to prevent waste and fraud. And given the number of poor people in India, and the limited amount of money they have to help them, it seems like quite a good thing to do so.

Identifying people is not hard, even for the poorest countries, and it's quite easy to do with modern technology. There is no good-faith reason to oppose it, any more than there is to oppose driver's licenses.

Did you read the article I linked? You keep saying this is an easy thing to do, but don't seem to acknowledge any of the problems it causes. It is not easy to identify people. It is easy to identify people with 99% accuracy. If the remaining 1% are unable to access society, that is an unacceptable risk.

Consider for instance the people who currently exist, don't have government ID, and don't have an accurate record of their birth. Such people exist. Should they just die, or something?

If you don't have a birth certificate, there are other ways to get an ID card. Immigrants do the US do it all the time. Pretending this is some unsolvable problem is ridiculous. It's like saying we can't collect taxes because it's impossible to identify people. When the government needs money, suddenly it's very possible to identify everyone and send them bills. Funny how that works.

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