Honest question: is it not reasonable to provide a means for someone to prove their identity and citizenship? If not, how in the heck do we stop, say, illegal immigration? Or voter fraud? If so, then in what way is that not an internal passport? What controls would you place on said "authentication" to prevent it from being misused?
No, it is *not* reasonable to have the government require you to obtain a means to prove your identity. This is completely different from "providing a means for someone to prove their identity and citizenship". That could be done by competing private companies, if there were a demand to do so commercially. The drive to have the "government" do it, especially with the airlines, is just a way to transfer costs and accountability to the government from the companies. That is why the airlines lobbied so hard for the security at airports (TSA) to be taken over by the government.
It *is* the job of the government to secure the borders, and we have instituted a passport system that is available. Passports are a fairly new requirement. They were not required for the first hundred years or so of this country.
As for voting, we had a pretty good system to prevent fraud that required people to register in person, to prove that they were a resident of their precinct, and to be known through the registration process by the volunteers that manned the polls. You could not vote unless you had been a resident for at least six months. Students at college, for example, maintained their voting status where they came from, because of the temporary nature of their residence.
All of that has been swept away by successive waves of liberal "reforms" designed to make voting (and in my opinion, voting fraud) easier and easier. We should return back to the old system in which absentee ballots were only allowed in circumstances where the voter could not make it to the polls, and in which those circumstances were vouched to and arrangements made at least a month before election day.
Going back to the old controls would serve us well.