My mom was reluctant to get me a Social Security card because she thought it would increase my risk of being drafted. (In the U.S., birth records are handled at

My mom was reluctant to get me a Social Security card because she thought it would increase my risk of being drafted. (In the U.S., birth records are handled at the state level, or for some purposes county level, while the military draft is handled at the federal level.) Of course, if I hadn't had one, there are tons of things that I wouldn't have been able to do (like official employment, banking, and credit, to start with). Military conscription is a huge impetus for population registration and tracking. In the U.S. there hasn't been conscription since before I was born, but there's still an agency that notionally registers military-aged men and their whereabouts, with intermittent halfheartedness and minimal enforcement. (My recollection is that all of the enforcement actions for the past few decades have been against men who wrote open letters refusing to register, or something, as opposed to those who simply forgot or declined to register.) James Scott has written extensively about how many people in history didn't want to be tracked by (or "legible" to) the state, because this would subject them to conscription and taxation. The idea that conscription or taxation are good and that you should want to be subject to them (either because of a theory of political legitimacy or because of benefits that they will personally bring you or your neighbors) is kind of a historical anomaly, although very widespread today. I do think the idea that you would be better off if you and the state didn't interact than if you did feels most plausible in a rural farming environment, and least plausible in a city in an industrialized society -- not that many people still don't wish to be, or think about being, free of the state, but that it's obviously taken up such an enormous role in life that it feels like a huge sacrifice to be totally invisible to it. A big trend over time all around the world, especially following the industrial revolution, has been higher taxes and more government services. Even if you don't personally feel this was a good trade-off, a whole lot of parts of life would "break" for you if you were outside of it.