>have a generic plate that can go anywhere

Functionally, that's what already exists - the standards are dimensions and readability. There's no CA smog inspection station as you enter the state, this is about people abusing a loophole. I spent all 4 years of college in CA with a CA driver's license, a car with out of state plates, and zero Kafkaesque issues. Maybe tax avoidance loopholes are Kafkaesque because they're not how anyone is supposed to do things.

As one more wacky way to do it, some countries rivet the license plate to the car because the plates never change. They're basically shorthand for the VIN, so the owner and their place of residence don't matter, only where the car was first registered.

Moves to different states are just not that common for the average American, and I would prefer for states to retain the power to implement their own policies in this area. I would not want to see e.g. California unable to change emissions policy because Texas isn’t on board.

Complexity is a cost of our federal system and I am okay paying it in most cases.

Even within California there are smog-exempt counties. This makes perfect sense, things like excess NOx simply don't matter if the population density is low enough which incidentally is also true of a lot of the rest of the country. CA is the strictest with smog-related, going as far as barring federal (non-CA) vehicles from being registered unless they're 7500+ miles on the odometer. Tint should be limited to 70% VLT nationally really, but that's another topic. Other than that some north-eastern states have safety inspections which makes total sense given the rust. By developed country standards we have it very easy.

Nobody seems to recognize how deranged it is that we drive around with easily identifiable numbers plastered on our vehicle. This has seemed weird and privacy-violating to me since I was a kid, yet even today when people complain about Flock cameras they don’t complain about what the cameras are looking for.

What if gun owners had to walk around wearing a huge plate with their gun registration number when they wanted to carry a gun?

And why do driver’s licenses have all sorts of extraneous info (all you need is a biometric, like a photo, expiration date, class of license, and any restrictions)? Just because I walked into a bar or bought a beer at the supermarket doesn’t mean they should be allowed to harvest my address, DOB etc.

The whole edifice is absurd.

I was with you in the first paragraph. As I was reading I was reminded of old Cold War-era Soviet Union.

You lost me in the next paragraph where your solution was to centralize even more into a committee that has the power to bulldoze over more locally relevant needs and desires

States could harmonize laws (if they wanted to).

Someone could compile every vehicle regulation from all the states into one common list. It'd be more restrictive than any single state, but it would be consistent. And if someone doesn't like it, they can fall back to their local laws.

Except that states want their pound of flesh; California is definitely no exception.

There are entities that are federal registrations (eg: an aircraft with an "N-number" -- that N-number is federal) that individual states still try really hard to tax the same way as cars/trucks. Individual counties even take a stab at this.

It seems that the rules might be there for some benefit but mostly the rules help the state/county make income.

This is the cost of living in a federated republic. Power is diffuse across the states so they all have different opinions on how to go about things like vehicle registrations and insurance. The only alternative is for states to relinquish the power over vehicle registrations/plates/insurance requirements to the federal government which could enforce a universal standard, but I'm sure given current events you would see why that would be a terrible idea.

I think as programmers we naturally want a single, universal standard for everything, but there are genuine advantages to having the current system as well, even with all of its flaws.

> and force the states to agree on a set of standards that apply across the country

To rephrase, you're asking that the same license plate work across all of the European Union.

To realize why this is unrealistic, one has to go back to history and understand the core concept of the United States of America. It's right there in the name itself. It was a compromise to unite and bring agreement across all these disparate states that were in their very own right entire countries (and most, even till date, most states in the US continue to be larger, geographically than most countries in the world), agree on some very basic terms so there could be trade across them, kind of like the European Union.

> but this current system is Kafkaesque

Of course, this license plate registration thing was optimized for tax and fee collection, and it does that job very well. All it takes is for someone to run for office and say they're going to overturn it all.

So a race to the bottom on licensing/taxation/safety/insurance/emissions? But only for those wealthy enough to have family trusts?

No. Each state needs the power to set minimum standards as to who can drive what. I don't want to see millionaires be allowed to drive around without insurance in unsafe cars simply because their daddy purchased them a share in a Delaware family-held plates LLC.

Window tint isn't nonsense, either. I think every stanced-out pickup with a tinted windshield should be apprehended and destroyed the instant it crosses my state's line.