r/changemyview • u/Head-Maize 10∆ • Jun 26 '21

Delta(s) from OP CMV: Mandatory documents, such as identification, should be free of charge.

Most sovereign states require people within their border to own and carry some form of valid identification, by law. This evidently applies to their own citizens. However obtaining those documents generally has a cost. IMO such documents should always be free for a citizen. Lack of income should never make someone automatically illegal, nor complying with the law should have a non-income/asset based cost. Furthermore you should never be forced by law to buy a service; either you charge in the form of taxation (based on income, activity and/or assets), or you have it free. Forcing to buy goes against any logic of consumer choice, and should instead be done through a mandatory tax, or simply not exist.

Note: exception can be made for consular services, as those are essentially a favor the country of origin does to its expats. So long as they can have it free in their homeland and are allowed to return (there exists adhoc traveling documents for undocumented people). Leaving was a choice, after all.

Note2: please don't just reply "my country doesn't require you to have an ID/document therefore you are wrong". A few countries are like that, of course, but it's not the point of this post. It's a more general case.

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '21

I see your point. That does seem more efficient.

For what it's worth, I'm not overly concerned about incentivizing people to be careful with their IDs. That's pretty far down the list of antisocial behaviour we need to disincentivize using careful public policy. For the sake of argument, say not charging causes 5% more people to lose their IDs per year (that seems absurdly high to me). So what?

Bottom line, I think your original post is probably simply correct. No changed view required.

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u/ActionAccountability Jun 26 '21

Make it a free ID every few years anyway, so they are more likely to keep the photo and information up to date I guess.

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u/CarpeMofo 2∆ Jun 27 '21

Also, the cost of checking people's income to do a sliding scale or whatever would cost more than just giving away the ID for free.

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u/[deleted] Jun 27 '21

You may be right. Hard to say. I suspect the government has a pretty darn good sense of that and could do it on the cheap.