Papers, Please…

The Cold War thriller The Hunt For Red October included a gracious exchange between the Soviet submarine captain (Marko Ramius, played by Sean Connery) and one of his officers (Vasili Borodin, played by Sam Neill). In it, Borodin mused on what he would do after they completed their defection to the United States:

Borodin: I will live in Montana. And I will marry a round American woman and raise rabbits, and she will cook them for me. And I will have a pickup truck… maybe even a recreational vehicle. And drive from state to state. Do they let you do that?

Ramius: I suppose.

Captain Borodin: No papers?

Captain Ramius: No papers, state to state.

The exchange refreshed our recollection (well, those of us old enough to remember) of the memes and ideas that were part of the zeitgeist of the era. Papers, please was a sarcastic critique of the bureaucratic stranglehold that un-free states like those behind the Iron Curtain (and, previously, Nazi Germany) placed on its citizens. It embodied the stark difference between socialist rule and Western liberty.

The Red October exchange came to mind when I read that a federal appeals court struck down a voter ID law in North Carolina. Voter identification is one of those partisan issues where each side ascribes the basest motives to the other. Generally speaking, the Right wants identification requirements for voting, while the Left does not. The Left accuses the Right of hidden racism, the Right accuses the Left of embracing voter fraud. The Left argues that there are people who go through life without picture IDs who would be disenfranchised. The Right argues that so much of modern life requires identification that it’s nonsensical to think that requiring a photo ID to vote would be a significant burden. Both sides argue that the other side is hypocritical.

The Left is correct in its assertion that there are people who go through life without the sort of ID that some of the recently enacted state-level voter ID laws require. The Right is correct in its assertion that, for most people, picture ID laws aren’t particularly burdensome. The Left is correct in noting the Right’s hypocrisy in wanting voter ID but distrusting firearm ID requirements. The Right is correct in noting the Left’s mirror-image hypocrisy on voting vs guns. The Left is correct that some are indeed disenfranchised by voter ID laws. The Right is correct that voter fraud does happen.

Both miss the broader issue: that we are becoming the Papers, please” society that Americans loathed and mocked for decades during the middle of the 20th century. Worse, Papers, please is something that is supported by millions of Americans who purportedly distrust government and embrace liberty. These folks point out that you need photo ID for:

• Opening a bank account.
• Applying for a mortgage.
• Buying a house.
• Buying a car.
• Renting a hotel room.
• Applying for many jobs.
• Buying video games labeled Mature.
• Seeing a movie rated R or NC-17.
• Buying a cell phone plan.
• Donating blood.
• Cashing a check or withdrawing money via bank teller.
• Entering a bar.
• Buying certain medicines.
• Visiting a casino.
• Buying cigarettes.
• Buying alcohol.

• Applying for unemployment benefits.
• Applying for welfare.
• Applying for food stamps.
• Applying for Medicaid.
• Applying for Social Security.
• Driving a car.
• Getting on an airplane.
• Getting married.
• Applying for a hunting or fishing license.
• Applying for a business or liquor license.
• Applying for a building permit.

• Buying a gun.
• Staging a rally or protest.
• Serving on jury duty.

This list is obviously not exhaustive, and there are exceptions to some of these. It’s also not consistent in that not all these requirements are alike. I sorted them into three groups on purpose.

The first group consists of private sector transactions. In many cases, the ID requirement is mandated by the government or driven by government requirements, but barring government requirements some of these ID requirements could go away.

The second group consists of interactions with the public sector. Some are about monetary transfers, others are about the bestowing of permission. If the government is in the business of transferring money from Person A to Person B, it should be expected to do things that make sure it does the job properly. After all, one does not have to ask the government for welfare and the like.

The second group also involves government involvement in contracts and transactions, in a similar but more formal manner than the transactions in the first group. Take government out of the mix, and photo ID becomes purely a matter between private sector actors.

The third group is about Constitutional rights, and here is where things become most egregious. Our right to assemble, our right to keep and bear arms, and our right to serve on a jury are all specifically protected by the Constitution, yet we face mandates that we provide photo ID in order to do so. We might even include air travel in this list, given that we have a fundamental right to move about as we wish, and that airlines are private-sector entities with which we contract.

All these examples of Papers, please can be sourced back to big government. So many of the transactions, contracts and agreements that we enter into every day are burdened by photo ID requirements that have their roots in a government that has gotten too big and too intrusive. It wasn’t even that long ago that we mocked Papers, please as exemplars of societies that we wanted nothing to do with.

It is a sad reality of life that dishonest and deceitful people look to cheat the system, break rules and do harm to others. Many of the photo ID requirements listed above are efforts to protect against the dishonest and deceitful, and we tolerate them for that reason. In this, however, we witness time and again the government’s default response: infringing on the rights of good people in order to guard against bad people. We’ve grown so inured to this that, even as we rail against infringements of liberty, we now commonly find arguments that favor certain infringements persuasive.

Which infringements one finds more tolerable likely depends on one’s ideological bent, as does the choice of solutions for the problems that the infringements are meant to combat. It’s unfortunate that ideology so thoroughly permeates this matter, because it leads to problematic solutions. In the case of voter ID, the far better point of interdiction should be the registration process. The Constitution mandates that only citizens get to vote, therefore there is an obligation to filter the voting process to ensure that only citizens vote. The work should be put into ensuring the voter rolls are correct, that those on them are actually citizens entitled to vote, that there not be duplications, that the dead get removed from them, and so forth. Doing so may very well be more difficult absent a voter ID requirement, but difficulty is not a valid excuse for rights infringement. After all, we don’t waive the search warrant requirement because it would be easier for police to catch criminals by simply searching any house they wished to.

Rights are lost nibble-by-nibble, not wholesale. They are typically lost via voluntary submission rather than tyrannical coercion. Voters clamor for things to be done to combat Problem X, and elect politicians who promise to do something about Problem X. Those politicians often find it easier to do something by infringing on our rights rather than to hold our rights sacrosanct and work within strictures, so they sell us on seemingly small infringements. They couch those sales in “common sense” terms or by offering equivalences (such as the list of other things you need to use photo ID for), and hope that we don’t notice that “common sense” is just linguistic gymnastics or that all those equivalences are themselves rights violations. We fall for it time and time again, and every time, we become slightly more complacent and slightly more used to having our rights taken away.

People mock the idea that America can some day become as tyrannical as the Soviet Union, Red China, the Third Reich or any of a long list of autocratic nations. I doubt that the citizens of those nations invited and cheerled tyranny when it rose over them, either. But, Papers, please makes it clear that it can happen here. In fact, it has already started.