We don’t have a national ID system, just a single, poorly suited Social Security number that’s been overloaded to serve as our entire identity in the eyes of the state. These numbers are effectively public knowledge, thanks to private credit agencies created to fill the gap when banks failed at risk assessment. We could’ve replaced this broken setup decades ago, but there’s a vested political interest in ensuring federal programs fail, to justify further privatization and the dismantling of social services.

A proper national ID and strong privacy laws would be obvious policy wins, but that would require competent lawmakers.

In my lifetime, the most consequential federal legislation has been the DMCA (1998), the Patriot Act (2001), and Obamacare (2010), which effectively marked the end of meaningful legislative power and the handoff of governance to the executive branch.