Americans have never had to carry the internal passports required in communist countries. Soon we will.
"Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, every citizen is still required to have an internal passport on his person at all times," reports Lisa Dean of the Free Congress Foundation. "If the citizen is ever stopped and asked for proper identification and fails to produce his internal passport, there are serious consequences." In a recent commentary on America's Voice, the news-talk cable television network,
Dean noted that Americans have "always prided ourselves on the fact that we had no such internal controls. A citizen could be born and live here without ever being on the government's radar screen."
That's about to change. "The Department of Transportation has just issued new regulations to which all states receiving federal assistance must conform," says Dean. "Beginning in October in the year 2000, states must have driver's licenses which feature a person's social security number for identification. Without that license," she warns, "citizens will no longer be eligible for health care or employment, or to conduct bank transactions, board an airplane, purchase insurance, obtain a passport, and so forth."
Dean describes how the driver's license was drafted for extra duty. "When Congress had an up-and-down vote on a national I.D. card during the immigration debate a couple of sessions ago," she recalls, "it emphatically rejected such a process. Congress understands that opposition to any sort of internal passport runs deep." And so, instead of creating a dreaded new document, "Congress passed and the Department of Transportation is implementing a backdoor national I.D. card."
This changes everything. "If you just want to grow up minding your own business, without any government assistance whatsoever, which is a venerable American tradition, forget it," says Dean. "Now every baby as of the age of two months has to get a Social Security card. And now every driver's license will contain that number. And with the new databases Congress has just approved," Dean predicts, "from the time a kid gets a summer job to the time the statisticians determine he has exceeded the healthcare rationing quota and the plug is pulled, that citizen is going to be tracked in a way that Josef Stalin would have admired."
This is but the latest example of the perversion of our federal system enabled by the income tax. Most of the prerogatives that the states have lost over the past century have been ceded voluntarily -- in return for pelf. The tradeoff has become so routine that hardly anyone notices: "new regulations to which all states receiving federal assistance must conform." There it is, right in the second paragraph, and how many of you stopped to consider the far-reaching implications? Outrageous regulations issuing from Washington are not compulsory at all; they only apply to states on the take. Just say no to the payoffs and ignore the regulations. Better yet, repeal the Sixteenth Amendment and deprive Uncle Sam of the wherewithal to offer bribes.
