Right, but they do check that your vision is good enough, and that you can answer basic questions. That is why the license expires.
I-Ds don't really have that sort of problem to address. In fact, we republish them without an expiration date as RFCs sometimes.
Expirations all have different reasons. Marriage licenses expire because status information can go stale (if left too long someone could have gotten married, for instance, or the level of one's education could have changed – this is asked in some places). Ham radio licenses in the US expire to insure that the person holding the license (a) is still alive and (b) still has interest in having one. That liveness test is relevant here as well, by the way. Insurance policies expire every year. Credit cards expire to avoid misuse. That is something we have to worry about, as I previously wrote. BTW, that doesn't mean that expired credit cards couldn't be misused, although that is not the normal failure mode these days.
Want a messier example? An X.509 certificate. Geech.
Eliot
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