This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, March 12, 2013. I'm Caleb Brown.

There are good reasons to believe that an eVerify system for employment will become a national ID.

Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, explained precisely

why at a Capitol Hill briefing held last month.

I was amused yesterday to watch the hearing in the Judiciary Committee where

Republicans who nominally stand for limited government, reduced regulation, so on and so forth.

Many of them clamored for increasing the regulation that is put upon employers, even increasing penalties that are put on employers.

I came to Washington as a Republican revolutionary in 1995.

I actually worked on the Judiciary Committee and I've seen some of the principles that we fought for then start to go to the side.

I work on principle at the Cato Institute trying always to get our government policies to consist with liberty, free markets, peace,

the basic constitutional values that our country was founded on.

And I think that he verified as well outside of those values.

So my specialty is identification and my concern with national identification systems and I think they

should be a concern of yours too because a great part of living in a free country is having freedom to identify yourself as you will.

It's a little arcane and sometimes it may seem a little bit silly,

but it's rather central to your ownership of yourself that you identify yourself as you wish, when you wish,

and that we don't impose artificial or unnecessary identification requirements on people

in order to access the good services and benefits of living in the United States.

So let me talk a little bit about what a national identification card or system is.

There's really a sort of just a simple three-part definition. One is that it is national. I think in EVerify we're

definitely talking about a national system. There are many identification systems that are not, such

as state driver's licenses or business identification cards and many other things.

...