See my parallel comment: my wife could be blind and still hold a WA state driver's license if she were willing to lie when filling out a form. In which case I'll ask: what's the argument for licensing if we don't even bother to check?

We do bother to check. If you get pulled over for a traffic violation and you don't have a license, you'll go to jail. These are really not convincing arguments. If anything, it seems the conclusion of what you're saying is that we need to be more rigorous in our testing and validation.

> We do bother to check. If you get pulled over for a traffic violation and you don't have a license, you'll go to jail.

If it's ridiculously over-the-top easy to receive and keep a license, even when it shouldn't be, then I argue the use of said license, and the checks around it, are useless. All your check is is checking that the person can do the very bare minimum of what would be considered "driving", and, worse, it's really checking that the person was able to do it X years ago, where X can be as far back as even 50 or so years ago. At that point, what's the use of checking? You are right that we should be more rigorous in testing and validation, but when that's the case, then the whole system is put into question.