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President Barack Obama has tried to prop up the housing market by helping people stay in their homes, even though they're still overwhelmed with mortgage debt. This is the latest in a long series of government interventions intended to promote homeownership.

But propping up the housing market has only prolonged the housing slump — a depressing fact brought home by the recent dismal home-sales reports.

So what to do?

Perhaps Obama could learn a lesson from our neighbors to the north. Canada, after all, didn't have a housing bubble. What explains the difference?

For decades, the U.S. has actively promoted homeownership through a raft of programs: generous mortgage interest tax breaks, subsidized loans, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loan guarantees, limits on what banks can repossess when a borrower defaults and so on.

The result has been an increase in homeownership, true, but it's also convinced far too many people to buy homes who couldn't afford them, helping to unrealistically push up home prices, which inevitably led to the subsequent collapse.

Even now, with interest rates near zero, millions continue to struggle to make mortgage payments, making it likely that the number of mortgage defaults will increase when interest rates rise. That means more homes will be offered by individual homeowners and banks with an urgent need to sell, depressing home prices.

Contrary to popular belief, a home isn't a good investment for everyone. First of all, it's imprudent for people of limited means to have virtually everything tied up in a single asset such as a home, whose value can go down as well as up. The bills are never-ending. For many, owning a home makes it almost impossible to save money for anything else.

And when people get government help to make their mortgage payments, they still have more debt and housing-related expenses than they can handle. In such circumstances, it's almost impossible to save money for the future.

Until the affected homes have been transferred to people who can afford the costs and risks of homeownership, those homes will hang over the market and continue depressing prices, as we're seeing now. When the government steps in to keep financially stretched people in their homes, it simply delays inevitable adjustments.

What's needed isn't more government involvement to help to prop up homeownership, but less. And if you don't think so, look at what's happened in Canada. More Canadians (68 percent) than Americans (66 percent) own their homes, yet the Canadian government has interfered very little in the private housing market.

• Canada doesn't have an income tax deduction for mortgage interest. Nor is there a tax advantage to converting home equity into debt.
• In Canada, mortgages aren't issued without verification of employment and income.
• Unlike Americans, Canadians cannot walk away from their homes without serious consequences — Canadian mortgages are generally full recourse, which means a bank can attach an individual's other assets and wages/salaries if necessary to pay the deficiency in the event of a mortgage default.
• Canada has nothing like Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, subsidizing subprime mortgages on a gigantic scale.
• Nor has Canada had anything comparable to the U.S. Community Reinvestment Act that promotes political influence over mortgage lending decisions.

The principal Canadian intervention in the housing market is to require that people buy mortgage insurance if their down payment is less than 25 percent of the purchase price.

As a result of these policies, in Canada people generally buy a home when they can afford it. Canadians tend to have significantly more equity in their homes than Americans do.

The Canadian housing market has been remarkable for its long-term stability. Occasional fluctuations have mainly reflected local circumstances, such as the oil-driven housing booms in Calgary and Edmonton, and the waves of Chinese money that have flowed into Vancouver.

Obama should end government interference that does much to prolong the housing slump. He should stop trying to prop up the housing market and let inevitable adjustments take place, so we can get through hard times as quickly as possible — enabling a genuine housing recovery to begin.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

This article is Jim Harper's closing remarks in a larger debate on The Economist's website.

Marc Rotenberg has been wise — in terms of debating tactics — to speak only in generalities about the "critical role" of government oversight, about government agencies taking a "more active role" and about independent privacy agencies that "speak up" when privacy is threatened. Putting forward concrete ideas for regulating the information economy would cause people to think more carefully and to recognise costs and benefits, which do not cut in favour of his position.

Privacy is about trade-offs. In exchange for the modicum of information people share online, they receive copious information and commentary, free e-mail services, search services, maps, driving directions, interaction with people who share their interests and much more. Greater government privacy regulation is not the death knell of the free internet, but it would undercut information services that are just getting by, as well as unproven ways of serving consumers.

(People should withhold information if they care to, of course. Here again is how to exercise control over cookies, the major source of demographic information for ad networks: in Internet Explorer and Firefox, go to the "Tools" pull-down menu, select "Options", click on the "Privacy" tab and then customise cookie settings.)

Then there is the benefit side of the ledger: can we expect privacy to flourish once governments begin doing "more"? The evidence suggests not.

In October of this year, the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) will celebrate its 40th birthday. As Mr Rotenberg's organisation notes on its website, this American legislation "establishes a framework of Fair Information Practices for personal information that include rights of data quality (right to access and correct), data security, use limitations, requirements for data destruction, notice, user participation (consent), and accountability". The FCRA is a model that proponents of government control would apply to the internet and the information economy.

But the credit-reporting industry has not blossomed with fairness, privacy, good customer service or transparency since Congress passed this legislation. Indeed, EPIC's 15-page, 6,000-word exegesis on the FCRA lists a dozen ways it believes the law still needs to be improved. In four decades, government legislation has not produced the information values Mr Rotenberg wants.

The Privacy Act of 1974 is another "Fair Information Practices"-based regime that was intended to improve the privacy practices of the American government. As with credit reporting, few would say that Washington, DC, has burbled up springs of privacy protection, data accuracy and transparency over the past 35 years.

The arguments for government control certainly seem to rest on good-hearted premises: if we just elect the right people, and if they just do the right thing, then we can have a cadre of public-spirited civil servants dispassionately carrying out a neutral, effective privacy-protection regime.

But this romantic vision of government seems never to come true. Crass political dealmaking inhabits every step, from the financing of elections, to logrolling in the legislative process, to implementation that favours agencies' interests and the preferences of the politically powerful.

The government regulation rêve is a bête noire. Congress passed the FCRA in the same legislation as the Bank Secrecy Act, creating a flaccid consumer protection regime in exchange for a robust and still-growing system of private surveillance on behalf of government.

The law was also a sop to business. As EPIC itself notes, "In order to gain passage of the FCRA in 1970, consumer advocates gave [industry] a big concession-immunity from defamation lawsuits based on information in the reports." The FCRA stopped American state governments doing what they were supposed to do — guarding individuals' rights — in favour of a federal information regime that made consumers helpless objects of government policy.

Mr Rotenberg's ambiguity may mean to signal otherwise, but there is no free lunch: regulation is costly, and it does not work well. Consumers' best source of protection is their own behaviour. Learn how internet communications work, withhold personal information more often and mete it out carefully when appropriate.

It is often said that consumers vote with their dollars. Online, consumers vote with their clicks. Spending and clicking are small but, in their numbers, powerful ways of influencing the world around us. And they are much more direct and effective than voting for politicians every few years, then begging them to do the right thing.

Consumers reveal their true interests (they move from generality to reality) when they make a purchase or visit a website — none more than my worthy debate opponent, Mr Rotenberg, whose count of Facebook friends recently surpassed 4,000. We should all work to change consumer understanding of reality by making clear the privacy costs of many online activities, but in the meantime real-world voters make clear their appreciation for interactivity, even at some cost to privacy.

Will a lame duck Congress pass cap-and-trade?

Judging from recent news, it might try. But, more likely, all the sound and fury will end up signifying its usual nothing. And it leaves the preferred option, where Congress punts the problem to the EPA, very much alive.

On Aug. 10, the House of Representatives blocked a resolution from Tom Price, R-Ga., that would have prohibited the House from convening a lame duck session after November's election unless there was a national emergency.

Climate Czarina Carol Browner recently suggested that such a bill could "potentially" be passed before the 112th Congress opens for business in January. In the new Congress, the House may very well be under Republican control. Hence the need for a lame duck climate bill.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., also supports the ideal of the lame duck session, telling The Hill that if climate legislation isn't passed in September, "then we're going to keep pushing and maybe come back after the election and do it in a lame-duck."

Kerry and Browner are dishing out good old-fashioned Washington bunkum, pandering to the Democratic "base," and hoping to eke out a few votes from the very disappointed green left, which feels that the administration and the Senate left it out in the cold when it comes to global warming.

Despite all the protests about ceding power to Obama, it's exactly what senate Democrats want. If the Senate passes a bill, at least 60 senators would be held accountable. If EPA does the dirty work, the onus falls on only one man, Barack Obama.

Another reason that the EPA option is the most politically acceptable solution is that their proposed emissions reductions are likely to be challenged in court, and that very little that is substantive — aside from EPA's demand for increased car and truck fuel economy — could see the light of day for several years.

It should come as no surprise that the Sierra Club, Environment America and the Union of Concerned Scientists said their new priority on global warming was to help protect EPA from litigation. Judging from how they and their allies failed to get a cap-and-trade bill, it looks like EPA will be tied up in court for a long time.

So there you have the future of global warming. No lame duck passage of cap-and-trade. EPA, cheered on in private by the Senate, takes over emissions regulation, transferring responsibility to the president, and legal challenges keep anything expensive in limbo for the foreseeable future.

President Barack Obama is continuing to reorient U.S. foreign policy in general, and in the Middle East in particular, along the lines of the internationalist/neo-realist approach pursued in the pre-9/11 years of Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Obama's Tuesday's televised address marking the end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq — coupled with his earlier decision to escalate U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan — and this week's start of a new round of U.S. orchestrated Israeli-Palestinian talks in Washington fit very much into his effort to reducing the costs of — as opposed to doing away with a policy based on the assumption that Washington will continue setting the agenda and determining the policy outcomes in the Broader Middle East — in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Israel-Palestine.

That should not have come as a major surprise to those of us who have been calling for long-term structural changes in American global strategy, starting with the necessary reassessment of the U.S. goal of maintaining a hegemonic position in the Middle East. After all, much of presidential candidate Obama's criticism of President George W. Bush's foreign policies as well as his proposals for changes in those policies sounded like the kind of the assessments that were being made by President Bush I's former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft who not unlike Obama was opposed to decision to invade Iraq and to oust Saddam Hussein and who was calling for a diplomatic engagement with Iran.

Indeed, contrary to the hopes raised by some of Obama's admirers in the anti-war movement — or the fears stirred up in his neoconservative bashers — Obama was not a closet peacenik, an isolationist, a "third wordlist" or an "Arabist;" and his positions on Arab-Israeli issues reflected a view shared by most of his predecessors in office. Moreover, compare Obama's phony "confrontation" with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the issue of the Jewish settlements with the Bush pèreway challenged former Israeli PM Yitzchak Shamir over the same question (threatening to withhold loan guarantees to Jerusalem, among other things), and the notion promoted by neoconservative pundits and others that Obama is the most "anti-Israeli" U.S. President seems laughable.

By trying to improve U.S. standing in the Arab and Muslim worlds, to engage Iran in the diplomatic arena, to begin a process of military disengagement from Iraq and to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process by emphasizing the U.S. role as an honest broker, Obama has not been attempting to transform traditional U.S. policy in the Middle East (or elsewhere). Instead Obama has been playing the role of a counter-revolutionary, turning back the radical foreign policy approach pursued by Bush the Second and his neoconservative advisors (the policy of preemption; regime change; diplomatic unilateralism; the Democracy Agendawhile embracing the more realist strategies pursued by Clinton and Bush the First.

That Obama has discarded the Bush era's stand of treating Israel as Washington's sheriff in the Middle East may explain why after eight years of having uninterrupted access to a U.S. diplomatic blank cheque some Israelis and their American supporters may have reacted with so much animosity towards the new president. Similarly, by treating the threat of international terrorism as a manageable national security challenge — as opposed to a part of a new global war against Islamofascism — Obama has helped protect the moral and strategic principles of U.S. foreign policy. It is President Bush and his advisors who had been violating those same principles.

From that perspective, the prose of Obama's televised address on Iraq on Tuesday seemed to reflect his goal of "de-neoconizing" U.S. foreign policy. There was no talk about democratizing Iraq and the Middle East, confronting an Axis of Evil or defeating Islamofascism. "The United States has paid a huge price to put the future of Iraq in the hands of its people," Obama said in the address from the Oval Office. "Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility," he concludes. "Now, it is time to turn the page." Indeed.

At the same time, the decision by Obama Administration to invite President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington on September 2nd to resume direct negotiations to resolve all final status issues — including Jerusalem, the Jewish settlements, and the Palestinian refugees, within a year — seems to send a signal to Arabs and Israelis that unlike his predecessor, President Obama was placing the Israel-Palestine issue on the top of his foreign policy agenda and was preparing to invest more time and energy — and involves paying huge political costs — in trying to resolve the Mideast conflict. Or so it seems.

On one level, Obama may be trying to recapture some of the elements of the strategic status-quo that had existed in the Middle East before 9/11 and the ensuing invasion of Iraq — and in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War and Gulf War I — during which the U.S. could maintain a relatively cost-free hegemony in the region. It could do so by pursuing a strategy of offshore balancing, by keeping U.S. military forces "over the horizon," through the "dual containment" of Iraq and Iran (and by playing the one against the other), and by sustaining the momentum of a perpetual Arab-Israeli peace process. While Bush and his advisors have contended that their radical foreign policy agenda — including the invasion of Iraq — was the proper U.S. response to 9/11, a realist strategy aimed at preserving U.S. status in the Middle East at weakening Arab and Muslim radicals would have been to topple the Taliban, destroy Al Qaeda and its satellites and reviving the Israeli-Arab peace process (and not to oust Saddam Hussein and transform the Middle East). So it is not surprising that that is exactly what the Obama Administration is trying to do now by trying to close the Iraq chapter, getting the peace process moving and "finishing the job" in Afghanistan.

The reason why this strategy is probably not going to work now is that the Bush Administration's policies may have already changed the balance of power in the Middle East as well as the political balance of power at home in a way that makes it difficult — if not impossible — to "de-neoconize" U.S. foreign policy and turn back the strategic clock and re-establish the pre-9/11 status-quo. Indeed, announcing the end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq and convening an Israeli-Palestinian summit in Washington do not change the depressing realities on the ground. They amount to not a lot more than media events. Iraq's Pandora Box of ethnic and religious rivalries remains wide open and a more powerful and assertive Iran and its Shiite allies there (and in Lebanon) are perceived as posing a major threat to the interests of the mostly unstable Arab-Sunni regimes in the region (Saudi Arabia; Jordan; Egypt). At the same time, Turkey is very concerned about the objectives of the Kurds in the North of Iraq and is ready to take action to protect its interests there. A huge powder keg is ready to blow up.

In the Holy Land, the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships are divided and the national consensus on both sides has been radicalized since the second Intifadah, 9/11, and the continuing Israeli occupation and settlements buildup, making it less likely that the Israelis and the Palestinians could resolve any of the major final status issues within a year. They could not achieve that goal in 2000 when Yasser Arafat was ruling over a unified Palestinian camp, when a relatively moderate political figure was serving as Israel's PM — and at a time when the U.S. was at the peak of its so-called unipolar moment and Iran, Hizbollah and Hamas were having great difficulties in trying to exert their influence. So why exactly will the peace process lead to the promised land of peace now?

Hence even if one presupposes a best-case scenario under which the issue of Iran's nuclear ambitions are resolved or being placed on the policy backburner in a way that averts a military conflagration involving Israel, the U.S. and Iran, it is still very difficult to envision a state of affairs that could bring about peace and stability in Iraq and in Israel/Palestine in the near future. To paraphrase what Oscar Wilde has said about marriage and second marriage, pursuing policies based on these assumptions would make would mark the triumph of intelligence and hope over intelligence and experience. But then many marriages and second marriages do work.

It is possible to imagine an alternate universe in which the U.S. has not endured the triple blows of 9/11, the war in Iraq and the Great Recession and was ready to use its enormous military and economic power to make peace and bring stability into the Middle East. But one does not have to be great geo-strategic thinker to conclude that in the real universe of post-Iraq war and the current economic mess coupled with the mood of the American public, the U.S. not going to have the needed economic and military resources and the political will to use them in order prevent he likely explosions in Mesopotamia and the Levant and to impose its own agenda there as it also tries to fight Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere and when, as Obama put it on Tuesday, "Our most urgent task is to restore our economy and put the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs back to work." Something gotta give, and it will probably be Obama's Mideast policy that will be the first to lose ground.

In his prime-time address last night, President Obama wisely avoided many of the pitfalls that tripped up his predecessor. He did not declare victory under a "mission accomplished" banner or claim that a fully-flowered democracy had been created in Iraq. Rather, he expressed his hope that violence comes down, that Iraqi politicians will reconcile their differences, and that Iraq may someday be capable of defending itself.

All Americans, even the president's most vocal detractors, share these same desires. But most Americans know that we can't want these things more than the Iraqis do, and our troops understand that best of all. Explains Maj. Joseph Da Silva, who logged three tours in Iraq, "We had military successes, but the Iraqis will decide whether it is a long-term success or not."

Maj. Da Silva and all of our troops have performed admirably. The president honored their sacrifices in his speech. Despite being told that they would be greeted as liberators and home by Christmas 2003, they have persevered through seven Christmases. But they also learned the limits of their power. Short-term success in Iraq will be measured by a reduction in violence. Ultimate success will be achieved when an independent Iraqi government commands the respect of the Iraqi people. We can declare mission accomplished when Iraqis are responsible for their own defense.

A rising chorus of voices, however, is working diligently against the ultimate goal of U.S. withdrawal and Iraqi self-sufficiency. Some people are advising the president to leave a permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq, essentially arguing that the United States is the rightful guarantor of Iraqi sovereignty, and that the Iraqis simply can't be trusted with security matters. Former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz says that Americans must "remain open to the possibility of a mutually agreed longer-term security commitment or military presence" along the lines of our five-decades-long presence on the Korean peninsula.

In fact, the disposition of U.S. troops in Iraq has been a point of contention from the beginning. In 2003, Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations advised that Americans should "get used to U.S. troops being deployed [in Iraq] for years, possibly decades, to come." Tom Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute agreed, predicting that "the protection of the embryonic Iraqi democracy" would be a "duty that will likely extend for decades" and calling for a "quasi-permanent American garrison in Iraq" to protect American interests there.

But Wolfowitz's apparent embrace of an open-ended nation-building mission is a particularly curious turn for one of the Bush administration's leading lights. It was Wolfowitz, after all, who conceded that the U.S. troop presence in Saudi Arabia and the military pressure on Saddam Hussein had "been Osama bin Laden's principal recruiting device." Looking ahead to the post-Hussein period, Wolfowitz implied that the removal of Hussein would enable the United States to withdraw troops from the region. "I can't imagine anyone here wanting to ... be there for another 12 years to continue helping recruit terrorists."

While George W. Bush must shoulder responsibility for the loss of blood and treasure in Iraq, he at least recognized that U.S. strategic interests were not served by a long-term presence there. Senior officials in the Bush administration had no intention of conducting nation-building in Iraq. They had no desire to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on an eight-year-long occupation. They erred in believing that a functioning Iraqi democracy would spring forth with minimal U.S. effort.

As an Illinois state legislator, Barack Obama saw the flaws in this thinking. He correctly predicted that the costs of the war would far outweigh the benefits. As president, he has wisely turned aside recommendations to leave U.S. troops in Iraq. He should heed the lessons that our troops have learned after multiple tours there, and avoid repeating the same errors in Afghanistan. "If Iraq is to teach us anything, it must be that a new idea cannot be beat into a society," Maj. Walt Cooper wrote in an e-mail in 2006.

"The lesson I fear we will take from Iraq is that we have figured out a way to impose order or governance on other societies," Cooper explained to the Washington Post's Greg Jaffe, "It is a different brand, but the same kind of hubris that got us into the mess I saw in 2006."

Despite today's milestone, the costs of the Iraq war will continue to mount until all U.S. troops are withdrawn from the country. President Obama should ignore those who have been proven wrong, and bring our troops home as scheduled.

At first glance, it seemed a silly headline even by the standards of MSNBC: "Can the GOP Survive a Tea Party Takeover?"

Of course, the story was yet another in the narrative that has been eagerly embraced by both the mainstream media and desperate Democrats: "Extreme" candidates who are associated with the tea-party movement are dooming Republicans to defeat this fall. If only the Republicans had nominated more moderate, "go along to get along" candidates, who supported tax increases and the health-care bill — why, they might even manage a ten-point lead in the Gallup generic ballot.

In fact, Republicans do have a ten-point generic-ballot lead, the biggest GOP lead in the history of Gallup's tracking poll.

Has anyone actually looked at those races featuring "tea-party candidates?" In Kentucky, Rand Paul has been the poster boy for tea-party Republicans. The media has wrung its hands and worried mightily about how his primary victory could cost Republicans a competitive Senate seat. However, the most recent Rasmussen poll shows Paul with a 9-point lead. With only two exceptions, he has led in every poll taken in the three months since his nomination. His opponent has not gotten above 42 percent in the polls all summer.

In Colorado, Ken Buck, another tea-party favorite, won the GOP Senate nomination, prompting more crocodile tears from the media. Despite the implosion of the Colorado Republican party, Buck is leading his opponent, incumbent Democratic senator Michael Bennett, by four to nine points and is pushing 50 percent in recent polls. The defeat of incumbent Utah senator Bob Bennett was met with wailing and the gnashing of teeth among D.C. pundits. The GOP nominee, Mike Lee, holds a 25-point lead. And, most recently, with challenger Joe Miller apparently upsetting Republican senator Lisa Murkowski in Alaska, the media is wondering whether there is now another Democratic "opportunity." Apparently, not much of one: Miller leads his Democratic opponent 47—39 in the only post-primary poll.

Meanwhile in Florida, Rick Scott's insurgent victory in the gubernatorial primary was trumpeted as great news for Democratic candidate Alex Sink. No doubt Scott carries some baggage, but he leads by three points in Rasmussen's latest poll. At the same time, tea-party favorite Marco Rubio has retaken the lead in his three-way race for Florida's Senate seat.

Similar results can be found in House races across the country: Supposedly "extreme" Republicans are leading in race after race.

Only in Nevada, where Senate majority leader Harry Reid has climbed back into a tie with Sharron Angle, is the media's narrative even close to true. But one has to ask how different would things be if a more establishment candidate such as Sue Lowden had won the Republican primary. Angle has been nothing if not controversial, but Lowden was hardly gaffe-free. (Remember the "pay your doctor with a chicken" flap?) After Reid spent $3 million on negative advertising, voters would likely have thought that any Republican candidate was slightly to the right of Attila the Hun. Despite this, Reid is still far from safe.

In the real world, as opposed to the one inhabited by most of the media, this new breed of anti-spending, pro-Constitution, limited-government candidates does not appear to be dragging Republicans to defeat.

But looked at another way, the question asked by that MSNBC headline is indeed relevant. If by "GOP" one means the party establishment that has controlled Congress and the national party since at least the Bush era, this group of insurgent candidates represents a significant threat. There's a reason why the tea-party Republicans had to run against their own party leadership.

Just look at where the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and its House counterpart put their muscle. While it was understandable that the NRSC would stick with incumbents like Murkowski and Bennett, it also backed Trey Greyson in Kentucky, Jane Norton in Colorado, and Lowden in Nevada, and stood with Charlie Crist in Florida right up to the moment that he ditched the party. Even now, NRSC chairman John Cornyn has dispatched attorneys to Alaska to help Murkowski with her potential recount against Miller — even as Murkowski explores her options for a third-party run.

After all, a Senate full of Pauls, Angles, Millers, Rubios, and others of that mindset would be a very different place. For someone like Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who based his last reelection campaign on all the pork he had brought home to Kentucky, the thought of Rand Paul joining him in the Senate must be uncomfortable.

The House Republican leadership can't feel any more secure. Minority whip Eric Cantor has already suggested that the GOP leadership may jettison its moratorium on earmarks next year. But dozens of new anti-spending Republicans will be elected this November. Will they stand for that sort of Republican backsliding?

Republicans claim that they have learned the lesson of their defeats in 2006 and 2008. They say that they are now firmly committed to limited-government principles. This new breed of candidate intends to hold them to that — and that is making the Washington establishment very uncomfortable.

When we think of human-rights problems, most of us imagine arbitrary arrests, political repression, religious persecution, torture, show trials, censorship, and the like. In America, we don't often have those kinds of problems. Even the current controversy over an Islamic center near ground zero isn't about the right to build there; it's about the wisdom of doing so.

All of which made it surprising to learn from the Obama State Department that America does indeed have human-rights problems.

The news came last week in the form of our first report on U.S. human-rights conditions to the U.N. Human Rights Council, submitted pursuant to a U.N. mandate that members conduct self-assessments every four years. According to the State Department, we fall short on "fairness, equality, and dignity" in areas such as education, health, and housing, especially when it comes to women, blacks, Latinos, Muslims, South Asians, American Indians, and gay people.

On closer reading, however, the claimed "human rights" problems start to look dubious. Take the report's contention that "work remains to meet our goal of ensuring equality before the law" — a human right, to be sure. The supposed evidence is that unemployment is higher among blacks and Hispanics; there are racial and ethnic disparities in home ownership rates; and "whites are twice as likely as Native Americans to have a college degree." But those are socio-economic inequalities owing to many factors, not inequalities before the law.

Or consider this point: "Asian-American men suffer from stomach cancer 114 percent more often than non-Hispanic white men." That's a human-rights problem?

So what's going on here? A little background will be useful. Founded on the ashes of the Second World War, the United Nations assumed as one of its gravest missions the protection of human rights. Toward that end, however, its declaration on the subject cobbled together both real and spurious "rights."

Hence the United Nations' two main rights covenants: one on civil and political rights — those any American would recognize — to which the United States is a party; and the other on economic, social, and cultural "rights" commonly recognized by European welfare states, which the United States signed but the U.S. Senate has never ratified.

The Carter administration was less than adept at defending America against Soviet charges that we failed to protect the second class of "rights." By contrast, the Reagan administration showed that the United States not only protected real rights, but in doing so afforded American citizens far more of the results that the Soviets purported to be providing their citizens as rights. Moreover, President Ronald Reagan went on the offensive, using the U.N. Commission on Human Rights as a forum for public diplomacy against some of the worst regimes of the Cold War, including the Soviet Union.

With the end of the Cold War, however, the lines between the two kinds of rights grew blurry. What's more, "human rights" became just another club to be wielded for political ends by human-rights abusers who sat on the commission, often targeting Israel and America.

When it got so bad that Sudan, deep into its ethnic cleansing of Darfur, was elected unanimously to the Commission on Human Rights in 2004, the U.S. ambassador walked out. But things got even worse, and the commission was abolished two years later — only to be reconstituted as the U.N. Human Rights Council, whose members today include such human-rights exemplars as Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Cuba.

Just last year, however, the United States joined the council as part of President Obama's outreach to the world. But in doing so and being required to produce last week's report, we've implicitly sanctioned the conflation of real and supposed rights, even as the Senate has declined for decades to ratify the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Moreover, the report reads like a politically correct campaign brochure, touting everything from stimulus spending to Obamacare as promoting human rights, which renders the idea boundless and therefore meaningless.

History has shown that nations that promise everything as a matter of rights have provided little but the oppression required by that misconceived goal. We should not abandon a distinction at the core of our political order that has enabled us to be both free and prosperous — much less do so in the good name of human rights.

Drums are beating in Washington for a value-added tax in addition to the "stimulus" taxes, health care taxes, energy taxes and other taxes President Obama has imposed and wants to impose on hard-pressed taxpayers.

Supposedly a value-added tax is a magic elixir for curing budget deficits and excessive debt. Quack remedy would be more like it. If it worked, you'd observe that countries with a VAT had budget surpluses and no debt problems. But almost every country that has a VAT is plagued with budget deficits and excessive debt.

The most notable exception is Norway whose government has net assets larger than its gross domestic product, thanks to large oil revenues and a small population.

By contrast, the U.S. GDP is dwarfed by trillions of dollars of the government's unfunded liabilities. In the event Washington introduced a VAT, the government would spend all the revenue and then some, as has happened so many times before, and we would again find ourselves struggling with budget deficits and excessive debt — and a bigger tax burden.

A VAT puts big spenders on steroids. It generates lots of revenue, and because this tax is substantially hidden from consumers, there's less political resistance to it.

For example, a lumber company sells $100 of lumber to a furniture manufacturer, and let's say there's a 10% VAT on that transaction. The lumber company remits $10 to the government. The manufacturer turns the lumber into furniture, sells $350 of it to a retailer and there's a 10% — $35 —VAT on that transaction, but the manufacturer deducts the VAT previously levied on the lumber ($10). So the manufacturer remits $25 to the government.

Finally, the retailer sells the furniture to a consumer for $500, and there's a 10% — $50 — VAT on that transaction, but the retailer deducts the VAT previously levied on the furniture ($35). The retailer remits $15 to the government. In this example, $50 of value-added taxes ($10 + $25 + $15) are passed on to a consumer, but the net tax on the final sale is only $15. Although the specifics of a VAT vary from country to country, a major political aim is still to conceal most of the tax from consumers.

The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development reported that since the 1960s, when the VAT began to be widely adopted, government spending by OECD member countries with a VAT soared from 30% of their GDP to 50%. Governments tend to spend all available revenue, and then some.

No surprise that the worst financial basket cases all have a VAT. Iceland has the highest VAT rates, but this didn't prevent its financial crisis and the near bankruptcy of its government. Italy's VAT rates are almost as high, and its debt exceeds its GDP. Financial crises are looming in Spain and Portugal, and of course they have a VAT.

Greece has a VAT, too, and when politicians ran out of money to pay government employees for more than a year's worth of work every year, they rioted in the streets. Great Britain has a VAT, and its government finances are in the worst shape since World War II — its budget deficit is expected to be bigger than that of Greece.

Moreover, the OECD has acknowledged that "(VAT) tax and transfer wedges have discouraged firms from offering employment and individuals from taking it, reduced employment and increased inequality."

By disrupting the economy, VAT-induced spending makes it more difficult to handle budget deficits and debt. The last thing we need is a VAT.

Have you noticed that many in the political class are absolutely shameless in trying to protect themselves and their colleagues from legitimate inquiry into their activities? For instance, Congress has passed a number of whistle-blower statutes, including the "financial-reform bill," to protect government and private-sector employees from retaliation when reporting the misdeeds of their superiors. Yet, the staff of members of Congress — precisely the people who are most likely to know about political corruption — enjoy no such protection.

Congress, under the guise of "campaign-finance reform," has repeatedly tried to find constitutional ways of limiting the free speech of real and potential opponents. What is even more remarkable, some members of Congress are not content with just trying to protect themselves, but have gone so far as to try to protect corrupt foreign leaders from those who may wish to expose their wrongdoing.

Exhibit A in this tawdry tale is a bill introduced by a notorious member of Congress, Rep. Maxine Waters, California Democrat, now up before her colleagues on ethics charges involving her successful attempt to get the taxpayers to bail out a bank where her husband sat on the board and where the Waterses had a substantial financial interest. This same Ms. Waters sponsored a bill, HR 2932, known as the "Stop Vulture Funds Act," which would basically prohibit investment funds that have acquired foreign debt that is now in default from seeking restitution from the defaulting and often highly corrupt governments.

These funds, which those who pander to the corrupt and irresponsible call "vulture funds," are actually the "good guys," because the investment fund managers have a very strong incentive to make sure that crooked government officials do not run off with their money, and thus they are willing to spend considerable time and money to provide the necessary evidence about ethically challenged government officials to the courts and news media.

Most of these fund managers do not undertake this activity for high-minded purposes, but to make a profit. As Adam Smith noted more than two centuries ago, the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker provide useful products for their fellow citizens primarily because they wish to make a profit — but in doing so, everyone benefits.

Why has Mrs. Waters introduced a bill to try to eliminate some of those who expose government corruption? In an excellent article in The Washington Post last week, Carol Leonnig explained how the corrupt president of the Republic of Congo, Denis Sassou-Nguesso, had funded a number of Washington lobbyists — to the tune of $10 million — with the goal of shutting down the sovereign debt investment funds. These lobbyists, in many meetings with Ms. Waters' staff, convinced her to introduce the legislation, which they largely wrote. But there is more to the story.

Back in 2006, I wrote several articles for The Washington Times exposing the misdeeds of Mr. Sassou-Nguesso — including his misuse of Washington lobbyists. These articles described, as others are now doing, how Mr. Sassou-Nguesso left his people in poverty while enriching himself from the Republic of Congo's huge oil wealth. English courts had certified his corruption, in part based on the good legal and investigative work of one of the foreign government debt investment funds. As a result, Mr. Sassou-Nguesso finally settled most of his country's debts. Now he appears desirous of getting revenge by trying to get the U.S. Congress to prohibit funds that have invested in government debt from legitimately going after those who defrauded them and other investors.

In last week's column, I described an arms deal between the French and Saudi governments, whereby the French are alleged in documents that will be presented to the court to have overcharged grossly the Saudis in order for kickbacks to be given to officials in the government of former President Jacques Chirac and his political party. The only reason this multibillion-dollar scam came to light was because of a complaint and legal filing in Paris by an individual involved in the case who felt cheated out of his commission. This is another example of a private party pursuing his own self-interest but, in doing so, revealing a major crime involving government officials. In an interesting twist, Jean-Yves Ollivier, a crony of Mr. Chirac, set up the system of international accounts to hide funds for African dictators, as documented by Global Witness and court filings in Hong Kong and London. Mr. Ollivier received $1 million dollars from the same Washington lobbying firm that received millions from Mr. Sassou-Nguesso and convinced Mrs. Waters to introduce "The Stop Vulture Act." Why, why, why?

Corruption in the issuance of government contracts is often brought to light by businesses that were deprived of the right to compete on a fair basis. Organizations representing taxpayers and public policy think tanks have identified many hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud, abuse and unconstitutional federal spending, which, if corrected, would take away any excuse by the political class about the "need" for tax increases. Rather than eliminate the unnecessary spending, some of the political class, directly or indirectly, threaten Internal Revenue Service audits or the tax-exempt status of these spending watchdogs.

Governments rarely adequately police themselves, and international organizations, such as the United Nations, International Monetary Fund, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, World Bank, etc., not only fail to police their member governments, but often end up sanctioning some of their members' worst practices. Thus, the news media, private companies, including investment funds, private individuals, and taxpayer and good-government organizations must not be quashed in their efforts to expose corrupt government officials. Fortunately, we can still vote out those in power who seek to restrict our ability to expose their wrongdoing.

In the run-up to Glenn Beck's religious-themed rally at the Lincoln Memorial Saturday, Rep. John Fleming, R.-La., issued a stark warning about the voters' choice in November. Either we "remain a Christian nation," he told a GOP women's group last week, or it's "down the socialist road" to "a godless society."

Standing by was Fleming's fellow Louisiana Republican, Sen. David Vitter, the most famous "john" in 2007's "D.C. Madam" scandal. Awkward.

The GOP has lately drawn energy from the Tea Party movement, which sprung up in 2009 to protest overweening government. That's where the TP'ers kept the focus early on, sensibly calling a truce on "culture war" issues.

Unfortunately, judging by the rise of "Christian nation" rhetoric among Tea Party figures, that's starting to change.

In April, Sarah Palin told the evangelical group "Women of Joy": "Lest anyone try to convince you that God should be separated from the state, our founding fathers, they were believers."

They were — but so what? Those believers deliberately crafted "A Godless Constitution." In their 1996 book by that name, scholars Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore chronicle our proud heritage of secular government, in which, as Madison put it in his Memorial and Remonstrance, religious beliefs are "not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction."

The Constitution's early critics complained "that it was indifferent to Christianity." The Rev. Timothy Dwight, president of Yale, thought we were losing the War of 1812 because we had "offended Providence," having "formed our Constitution without any acknowledgment of God."

Indeed, Kramnick and Moore write, the Framers enshrined "the Lockean liberal ideal" in the nation's fundamental law, creating "a demystified state, stripped of all religious ambitions."

Today, some Americans apparently fret about whether President Obama is "really" a Christian. Well, he sure sounds like one, as when he complained last summer about "folks who are frankly bearing false witness" about his health care bill, or when, on the campaign trail, he told one church gathering that, with the right leadership, "we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth."

Whatever happened to that "demystified state"?

I headed to the Beck rally Saturday, seeking fodder for a "What I Saw at the Revolution" column. But what I saw wasn't all that revolutionary.

Amid the usual Gadsden ("Don't Tread on Me") banners were a few "Christian flags" — white, with a red cross in a blue canton. Mostly gone were the spunky anti-government signs that dominated earlier rallies (organizers had discouraged them). Overall, it was largely as Beck had promised: 8/28 had "nothing to do with politics" and "everything to do with God."

The God Preacher Beck described from the Lincoln Memorial steps wasn't a vengeful Old Testament deity enraged by ruling-class corruption, but a benign, grandfatherly one who just wants America to be all it can be.

Some reporters likened 8/28 to a "religious revival," but it wasn't nearly that fervid and exciting. For once, the New York Times's description rang true: It "had the feeling of a large church picnic."

I confess I liked the Tea Partiers better when they were a little angrier — and when they stuck to the point.

America is a "Christian Nation" only in a trivial sense: that most of us, now and at the founding, are Christians.

And that's neither here nor there. "Creeping secularism" and insensitively situated mosques aren't what plagues us — it's a deluge of red ink falling on the just and the unjust alike.

Renewed faith may save your soul, but it won't save us from our looming fiscal apocalypse. For that, we need energized citizens who keep their eye on the ball.

Today we will look at a perfect example of sack of gutlessness that goes by the name of William Kristol. But he is far from alone.

This past weekend I turned on the TV and saw the end of a past event that was held at the Brookings Institution back on May 13. The event was Neoconservatism and the Future of American Foreign Policy and was held to mark the publishing of the book Neoconservatism — The Biography of a Movement. by Justin Vaïsse. All well and good; especially given the role neoconservatives have played in advocating the invasion of Iraq or urging military strikes on Iran.

The panelists were E.J. Dionne, Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution; William Kristol, Editor, The Weekly Standard, Francis Fukuyama, Bernard L. Schwarz Professor School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and the book author Justin Vaïsse, Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution.

Unfortunately, the part I saw was at the very end of the Q&A, literally the last question that was asked. But it was more than enough.

Here is how it appears in the transcript

SPEAKER: Hi. My name is Pete and I'm just a taxpayer. I guess one of the lines I liked in your book, Justin — my French is terrible, but I apologize — was that speaking about the neoconservative love of — love affair with the military. And I'm just curious to each member of the panel whether or not the intellectual underpinnings of the ideas should at all be influenced by the fact that as far as I know — and, hopefully, I'm wrong — none of the leading thinkers or proponents of the movement as you call it have ever served in the military. And I'm just curious does that contribute in a way to their lack of understanding of what soldiers, Marines, airmen, sailors can actually do on the ground, especially in those forward operating bases, joint security stations, combat outposts that we speak about, continuing to man and our posture in the years ahead?

Interestingly, or perhaps tellingly, almost all panelists avoided dealing with the question.

Vaïsse said, "And as for any neoconservatives serving in the military, I will simply defer to the other panelists and to Bill maybe."

Dionne said, "Just on this question, I want to leave it to them.

Fukuyama said nothing.

And here is what Kristol is said:

You know, people can debate. I'm not going to give some — in some defensive way, give some list of people who have served in the military on one side or the other. I think the question is really contemptible.

One can understand Dionne. After all he was never a neoconservative and has not incessantly called for invading other countries.

Fukuyama should have said something considering that as a key Reagan Administration contributor to the formulation of the Reagan Doctrine, he was an important figure in the rise of neoconservatism. He was active in the Project for the New American Century think tank starting in 1997 and as a member co-signed the organization's letter recommending that President Bill Clinton support Iraqi insurgencies in the overthrow of then-President of Iraq, Saddam Hussein. He was also among forty co-signers of William Kristol's September 20, 2001 letter to President George W. Bush after the September 11, 2001 attacks that suggested the U.S. not only "capture or kill Osama bin Laden", but also embark upon "a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq."

But beginning in 2002 he began to distance himself from the neoconservative agenda of the Bush Administration, citing its overly militaristic basis and embrace of unilateral armed intervention, particularly in the Middle East. By late 2003, Fukuyama had voiced his growing opposition to the Iraq War and called for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation as Secretary of Defense.

So perhaps he feels he has already done his penance.

But it is Kristol whose rhetorical chutzpah that deserves our attention. Remember that Kristol, aside from being the son of Irving, who served as the managing editor of Commentary magazine and has been described as the "godfather of neoconservatism" was best known as Chief of Staff to the Vice President Dan Quayle in the George H. W. Bush administration. The New Republic dubbed Kristol "Dan Quayle's brain" upon being appointed; which, both in retrospect and obvious at the time, was not exactly a big hurdle to jump.

Kristol was a leading proponent of the Iraq War. In 1998, he and other prominent foreign policy experts sent a letter to President Clinton urging a stronger posture against Iraq. Kristol argued that Saddam Hussein posed a grave threat to the United States and its allies: "The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy."

In June 2006, at the height of the Lebanon War, he suggested that, "We might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait?"

Now everyone has the right to exercise their First Amendment opinion, no matter how ill-informed it is. The country has allowed American neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois in the late 1970s and more recently we've let the funerals of dead soldiers be disrupted by hateful, religious bigots, all in the name of free speech.

But by the same standard people have every right to question the qualifications and wisdom of those advocating a policy, especially when the stakes are literally life and death. If a member of the general public suddenly claimed that eating Big Macs was the way to cure America's obesity one would expect that questions would be asked of their medical credentials.

Similarly, when Kristol who rarely, if ever, sees a possible U.S. military action he doesn't support — as he said in his response "we are just generally hawkish" — should absolutely expect to be questioned about his qualifications for advocating wars.

As is obvious to anyone who has ever served in the military wars are ALWAYS about killing people and destroying things. There is no way around it.

People like Kristol and Fukuyama, and so many others in Washington and elsewhere who deliberately choose to be mouthpieces in the service of American empire deserve all the skepticism and doubt that can be piled on them. Wars are not just another mere public policy debate; they are the ultimate life and death choice, affecting not only those in the military who carry them out but the rest of the country which sends them as well. Those who advocate them damn well better be prepared to back up their choices with logical reasoning, instead of gutlessly sputtering with feigned indignation and acting like the American version of the famed British Colonel Blimp . You want to know what is really contemptible? Being a pompous, jingoistic warmonger who has no stake in the policies he advocates is contemptible.

After all, taking responsibility for one's action is supposed to be a bedrock conservative principle. One would never have seen a real conservative like Bill Buckley ducking the question. Of course, unlike Kristol, Buckley had actually served in the military, and the CIA.

All in all, Kristol, and far too many others like him, is the perfect example of the classic Latin expression, "dulce bellum inexpertis", translated as war is sweet to those who have never experienced it. This is a quote from an ancient Greek poet Pindar, made famous by the Dutch Renaissance humanist Erasmus as the title for his meditation on the subject of war.

And, before you ask, I served four years active duty in the U.S. Navy, 1973-1977.

Despite occasional conciliatory language, the overall tone of the Pentagon's just-released annual report to the US Congress regarding China's military power seems more worried and confrontational than its predecessors, with the exception of the extremely hawkish version released in 2006 during the Bush administration's most militant phase. While American commentators generally have not interpreted the tone in that fashion, scholars and journalists in East Asian countries, especially Japan, certainly are doing so, and they express concern about a further deterioration in relations between Washington and Beijing. Such a prospect understandably agitates nations in East Asia, since it would inevitably raise tensions throughout their region.

In terms of substance, most of the major observations and complaints contained in the report are familiar ones. Washington once again objects to lack of "transparency," both with respect to the level of China's military spending and the nature of China's security doctrine.

The point about spending is entirely warranted. Beijing habitually understates the amount of its military budget. No credible Western analyst takes the official figure (some $71 billion in 2009) seriously. Numerous items, including research and development costs for major weapon systems — normal features in nearly every other country's defense budget — are not included in China's. Most independent estimates of Beijing's military spending conclude that the actual level is anywhere from 20 percent to 100 percent higher. The Pentagon's own estimate is that spending was approximately $142 billion in 2009, and will be "over $150 billion" in 2010. Interestingly, previous reports included both "low end" and "high end" estimates. In the current document, the low-end figure seems to have disappeared.

The complaints about the lack of transparency in China's defense doctrine are less legitimate. China does not give much detail about its military's goals and purposes, but that reticence is not all that different from most other major countries. Indeed, the same allegation could be directed at the United States, which Chinese officials and policy analysts have done from time to time.

Even less justifiable are the concerns expressed that China's overall military expenditures, and the development of certain weapon systems, seem to be more than necessary for the country's legitimate defense needs. That objection is especially in bad taste coming from the United States. Even if one accepts the Pentagon's estimate of PRC military outlays, they are still dwarfed by the more than $700 billion US military budget. China has a stronger case that it is Washington's spending and capabilities that are wildly out of proportion to America's legitimate defense needs.

With regard to China's apparent strategic objectives, the new assessment intensifies the warning in last year's report that while Taiwan remains the core issue for Beijing, China's ambitions now seem significantly broader. Specifically, the Pentagon notes the growing efforts to project power farther out into the Pacific and, increasingly, into the Indian Ocean. Perhaps the greatest worry expressed in the document concerns China's development of a new anti-ship ballistic missile with a projected range of nearly 1,000 kilometers. Such a weapon could put the US naval fleet, including the vaunted aircraft carriers, in the Western Pacific within striking distance.

That development would, at a minimum, complicate Washington's implicit commitment to intervene on Taiwan's behalf if Beijing sought to use force to compel the island's reunification with the mainland. Such a potent weapon, combined with the rest of China's military modernization program, could even raise the probable cost of any US intervention so high that no rational American president would incur the risk.

It is unsurprising that China would seek to expand its reach out from its homeland. Historically, that is what rising great powers do, and China is clearly a rising great power. It is also unsurprising that Beijing appears intent on developing the military wherewithal to settle the Taiwan issue on terms favorable to China. Both the Chinese people and the regime regard Taiwan as rightfully Chinese territory, and they view the return of the island to China's possession as the last remaining major piece of unfinished business from their country's long period of humiliation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Although Beijing clearly prefers to use economic incentives and other peaceful measures to entice Taiwan into accepting eventual reunification, the threat of force lurks in the background if a conciliatory strategy proves unsuccessful. Washington must face that reality, and US leaders must ask themselves whether preserving Taiwan's de facto independence is ultimately worth the risk of a nasty confrontation with China.

The new Pentagon report merely confirms that China is a rising great power with ambitions to match. That is an uncomfortable development for the United States as the incumbent hegemon in East Asia. And perhaps that accounts for the somewhat grumpy tone of the latest document. But China does not appear to be a malignantly expansionist power akin to Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or the Soviet Union. Instead, it seems to be a conventional great power seeking to shape the international system in a prudent way to its own advantage. Although that understandably creates some anxiety for the United States — and for China's neighbors in East Asia — it is an anxiety that can and should be managed. Unfortunately, the Pentagon report does little to advance such a goal.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

This article is Jim Harper's rebuttal in a larger debate on The Economist's website.

If privacy protection is the goal, we might want governments to do quite a bit less, not more.

Marc Rotenberg's opening statement catalogues many things governments could stop doing if they want to aid our privacy protection. His organisation, EPIC, indeed fought the American National Security Agency's "clipper chip" proposal, which would have given authorities a back door into encrypted communications. The Federal Bureau of Investigation's "Carnivore" system likewise would have given the government an ability to "sniff" e-mail and other electronic communications. Total Information Awareness was an American government plan to aggregate every scrap of data about people — internet surfing, e-mails, phone calls, purchases, payments, auto tolls, travels and so on — then sift through it all looking for wrongdoing.

As Mr Rotenberg notes, EPIC now leads the charge against deployment of "strip-search machines", devices that reveal the naked body to government officials at airports and other checkpoints. In respect of airports, few locations so bristle with government intrusions on privacy — intrusions that are not a balanced response to the threat of terrorism. For example, the Department of Homeland Security collects ten fingerprints from foreign visitors (potential terrorists, all!). The US-VISIT programme holds this biometric data for an astounding 75 years.

Under the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, US citizens now must show a passport when they return from shopping trips to border towns in Canada and Mexico. The American government was a prime mover behind the "e-Passport", a computer-chipped travel document that allows its contents to be read at a distance by radio. Governments are experimenting with other RFID-chipped cards that allow people's identifying information to be scanned and entered on a database as they traverse borders and internal checkpoints.

If government ID cards do not capture people's movements, perhaps surveillance cameras will. Here, the British government seems to have the lead. Reportedly, there is one camera for every 14 people in the country, and 20% of cameras globally are in Britain. Governments worldwide are collecting DNA from their subjects for a growing variety of reasons.

We need not think only of direct surveillance, of course. Governments have a large role in creating structural bias against privacy in the protocols and technologies around us. Take the American Social Security number (SSN). Akin to many social insurance and national ID numbers around the world, it is a national identifier that has propelled forward the tracking that Mr Rotenberg rightly worries about. Immediately after mandating workers to apply for an SSN in 1936, the American government began promoting it for more and more uses: first state unemployment insurance programmes, then taxpayer identification, purchase of savings bonds, various welfare and entitlement programmes, and so on.

In 1970, America's Federal Bank Secrecy Act required financial-services providers to obtain their customers' SSNs and use them in reporting information to the government. The financial-services industry made lemonade from these lemons. It got much better at tracking customers for marketing and promotional purposes. As it consolidated in the early 1970s, the credit-reporting industry similarly organised itself around the uniform national identifier that had been created, propagated and promoted by the government over the preceding 35 years.

The practices Mr Rotenberg objects to are not just facilitated and propelled forward by government regulation and programmes. Governments are leading participants in this information economy. As Mr Rotenberg points out: "Government agencies are often the top clients of those companies in the data broker business. And what governments cannot buy they can often obtain through legal authority and data retention mandates."

In June, Mr Rotenberg participated in a debate in which he faced Mike McConnell, former director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and director of National Intelligence. Mr Rotenberg was rightly flabbergasted to hear Mr McConnell deny that the NSA had illegally conducted warrantless internet surveillance, even though a federal judge found it illegal earlier this year, and even though Congress two years ago saw fit to immunise the telecommunications companies that participated in the programme.

The American government, like others around the world, is a voracious information collector. It facilitates and promotes private-sector tracking and surveillance. It skirts and sometimes violates laws intended to restrain its snooping, and it cannot be held accountable when it does.

This does not seem like the kind of institution one would turn to for privacy protection. "Independent privacy agencies" and government bodies like the tiny, well-meaning American Federal Trade Commission do not tip the balance the other way.

People who want privacy have no better resource to turn to than themselves. Being more careful with personal information — learning how internet communications work, withholding personal information more often and meting it out carefully when appropriate — is the only reliable privacy protection. The next most important step is limiting government access to private-sector information, something on which Mr Rotenberg and I agree, though he may not prioritise it as much, preferring to pursue regulation of private business instead.

The Consumer Financial Protection Agency is the new kid on the block, a stranger among many agencies regulating financial institutions. The new kid has an agreeable name, but may turn out to be a bothersome nanny or the school bully.

The CFPA is the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren, Harvard law professor, author and head of a TARP oversight panel. She is obviously eager to run the agency and, as a Washington Post article noted, "has received fervent backing from consumer advocates, labor unions, academics and scores of Democratic lawmakers. ... If Obama doesn't choose her, he risks infuriating his already-agitated liberal supporters."

Mother Jones added that "progressive groups" like MoveOn.org have "organized petitions and endorsement statements on her behalf."

All this liberal fervor and well-funded agitation looks suspicious. Why do liberals talk, write and petition as if it would make such a huge difference if one person rather than another ran this supposedly kind and gentle new agency? What do they know that you don't?

Warren's writing about the mission of the CFPA provides a preview of what she might try to do with that agency's capricious power. Her most serious effort to promote a CFPA appeared in a rambling 100-page article in the November 2008 Pennsylvania Law Review, "Making Credit Safer." Although it was co-authored with Oren Bar-Gill of New York University, it simplifies things to refer to it as Warren's paper.

Her thesis is that "many consumers are uninformed and irrational," so they need to be protected from themselves. For example, "over half of all African-American and Hispanic borrowers" suffer from "mis­placed trust in lenders and mortgage brokers."

Warren cites a newspaper article that suggested mortgage brokers steered borrowers toward subprime loans to collect kickbacks. A few pages later, borrowers are said to be irrational because of a survey that "revealed a significant bias against mortgages generated by brokers."

How dumb are we? Well, says Warren, "Many consumers do not know their credit scores." Count me among those irrational consumers. I vet yearly credit reports for errors, but do not pay the fee to see my scores.

Warren finds it irrational that "a majority of consumers who accepted a credit card offer featuring a low introductory rate did not switch out to a new card with a new introductory rate after the expiration of the introductory period," and then keep switching cards again and again. Such an endless flood of new credit application would, of course, threaten those credit scores.

Warren has repeatedly argued that the "most striking" evidence "that errors are prevalent" in the mortgage market is that "a substantial number of middle-income families (and even some upper-income families) with low default risk sign up for subprime loans. Because these families qualify for prime-rate loans, these data indicate a very costly mistake on the part of these middle-income borrowers."

This is the Warren Myth. Although Warren imagines "the evidence of prime consumers taking subprime loans is most striking," that was the first of "Ten Myths of the Subprime Crisis" debunked by economist Yuliya Demyanyk in a 2009 paper for the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

Contrary to Warren, Demyanyk explains that prime consumers taking subprime loans is not, in fact, "evidence ... that such borrowers must have been steered unfairly and sometimes fraudulently into the subprime market." What the Warren Myth fails to grasp is that "subprime mortgages are defined in a number of ways — not just by the credit quality of borrowers."

"A loan can be labeled subprime," Demyanyk notes, "because of the type of lender that originated it, features of the mortgage product itself or how it was securitized." Some types of mortgages were automatically labeled subprime, for example, such as "2/28 hybrids" that in 2005 started with average rates of 7.5% for two years but switched to an adjustable rate.

Many mortgages were also securitized into pools that defined risk differently, so a borrower with a high credit score but a low down payment could easily end up within a pool that became defined as consisting primarily of subprime loans — not of subprime borrowers (as gauged by credit scores).

Warren depicts all borrowers as innocent victims. She even includes the "liar's loan" as an example of "innovations that have exploited consumers' imperfect understanding of complex credit products."

Many borrowers who chose low-down-payment subprime loans in 2004-06 were spendthrifts who refinanced into larger mortgages in order to cash out equity and get more cash. The average down payment on subprime loans in 2006 was only 6%, according to the Dallas Fed, compared with 12% for near-prime loans.

Nearly all of those subprime loans were used for refinancing. The smaller the down payment or lower the documentation the higher the risk, which makes such loans worthy of a subprime designation regardless of the borrower's credit history. Speculators hoping to flip houses for a quick tax-free capital gain likewise had a powerful incentive to minimize down payments.

Warren offers a bizarre explanation of the foreclosure crisis. She thinks "the high rate of foreclosures in the subprime market suggests that not all consumers knowingly assumed such a high risk of foreclosure."

What happened is that many who knowingly became overleveraged did not expect to lose their job, or to see house prices collapse, or both.

Warren finds more proof of consumer stupidity from a survey finding "30% of Americans did not know what the letters 'APR' stand for." But most Americans, including blacks and Hispanics, can tell the difference between one year and two weeks.

Warren, by contrast, converts a $30 fee for a two-week $200 loan into "an annual interest rate of almost 400%." That would be true if anyone kept rolling it over all year, as some do with credit cards. In reality, borrowers understand they're paying 15% to get $100-500 a couple of weeks early. That can be cheaper than a bounced-check fee.

Warren says "paying a 400% interest rate ... is very difficult to rationalize when the borrower can draw on substantial liquid assets." The study she cites, however, is not about liquid assets, but about "$1,000 of credit card liquidity."

When it comes to credit cards, though, Warren finds "further evidence of seemingly irrational consumer behavior. The most striking data show that ... more than 90% of consumers with credit card debt have some very liquid assets in checking and savings accounts."

It is rarely prudent to empty your checking and savings accounts to pay off one bill out of many. Warren nonetheless finds it striking that "one-third of credit card borrowers hold more than one month's income in these liquid assets." Investment advisers suggest keeping enough cash on hand to cover three to six months of expenses.

What does Warren dream of doing with all the power that Congress has so capriciously bestowed on this new agency? She would most like to impose national usury laws.

Prior to a 1978 Supreme Court ruling, Warren notes, "The linchpin of consumer credit regulation was usury law. ... (State) usury laws regulated credit by imposing a cap on the interest rate that any lender could charge." Today, however, "any lender with a federal bank charter can locate its operations in a state with high usury rates (e.g., South Dakota or Delaware) and then export that interest rate to customers located anywhere else in the country."

Any economist will tell you that ceilings on interest rates would simply ration-out all but the most creditworthy borrowers, particularly hurting young people and business startups. But Warren is no economist. She's no investment adviser either.

Warren's writing about consumer irrationality in the markets for mortgages, credit cards and payday loans displays massive misinformation and unwarranted hubris. Her nostalgia about usury laws is economically illiterate and potentially disastrous.

The Financial Reform Act was commonly described as "rewriting the rules" of lending. But it was mostly about delegating vast new discretionary powers to regulators who can later make up rules by whim and enforce them with stiff penalties.

Nobody doubts Warren's personal charm or missionary zeal, but her qualifications and competence merit a much closer look.

Why is it that one government report after another "unexpectedly" bears more bad news about jobs? Last week, according to Bloomberg, "The number of unemployment claims unexpectedly shot up." Before that, Reuters reported, "Employers unexpectedly cut jobs." This "unexpectedly" bit has been going on for quite a while, suggesting that journalists continue to be surprised that President Obama's progressive agenda has failed to revive private-sector job creation. One might as well say, "Monday unexpectedly will come next week."

There's no secret about how to create private-sector jobs. Plenty of experience has shown how to do it, and a great deal has been written about it. The literature on the subject goes back a couple of hundred years, so Mr. Obama can't say he just missed a tweet.

The first step is to make private-sector job creation a top priority. That's vital, because the private sector pays all the bills. Government doesn't have any money other than what it extracts from the private sector. Well, Mr. Obama never made the recovery of private-sector job creation a top priority because he was busy pushing his progressive agenda, including a big "stimulus" bill for government employees, government-run health care, more compulsory unionism, carbon taxes and other policies that have a negative impact on private-sector employment.

Mr. Obama's hero Franklin D. Roosevelt never made the recovery of private-sector job creation his top priority, either. He was busy establishing big welfare programs, public works projects, compulsory unionism and the first big U.S. entitlement. He multiplied the number of regulations and tripled federal taxation during the 1930s. Those policies made it more expensive and difficult for employers to hire people — major reasons why FDR's New Deal was plagued by chronic double-digit unemployment despite the 60 percent expansion of gross domestic product between 1933 and 1937.

If private-sector job creation is a top priority, government must reduce the cost of hiring people and remove other obstacles to employment. Payroll taxes make it more expensive for employers to hire people, and Mr. Obama increased payroll taxes. Minimum-wage laws discourage employers from hiring people who are worth less than the legal minimum because of their limited skills and work experience — Mr. Obama didn't try to stop last year's minimum-wage increase. Mr. Obama backs labor unions that obtain above-market compensation and benefits, pricing employers out of markets (autos, steel, textiles, etc.) and destroying private-sector jobs. Obamacare imposes penalties on employers who hire more than 50 people. Mr. Obama is spending trillions of dollars the government doesn't have, which naturally leads employers to anticipate higher taxes, and they're reluctant to hire people before they know how high taxes are likely to be. Mr. Obama's financial "reform" bill authorizes government agencies to issue hundreds of costly regulations, and the resulting uncertainty further discourages employers from making financial commitments needed to hire people.

Mr. Obama has similarly throttled private-sector investment. He threatened to increase taxes on dozens of the top U.S.-based multinational companies, which would tend to depress their shares that are in individual securities accounts, pension funds, endowment funds and other portfolios. Mr. Obama repeatedly has demanded "soak-the-rich" taxes on private-sector job creators. He raised taxes on interest, dividends, annuities and rents. And of course, Mr. Obama wants the George W. Bush tax cuts to expire at the end of this year, which, in effect, means tax increases, including a top federal income tax rate of 39.6 percent, a dividend tax of 39.6 percent, a long-term capital gains tax of 20 percent, a return of marriage-tax penalties, a return of the death tax (55 percent on estates over $1 million) and a phaseout of itemized deductions for private-sector job creators — all this in addition to applicable state and city income taxes. Bottom line: less private-sector capital available to create private-sector jobs.

Mr. Obama could supercharge the economy if he eliminated all these policies that make it more expensive and difficult for employers to hire people, but that would mean dumping his progressive agenda. Does anybody expect him to do that?

On August 5th, Social Security trustees released their report showing that permanent annual Social Security deficits will begin in 2015, when next year's high school seniors graduate from college.

Since there are more than 50 million Social Security beneficiaries, and their numbers are growing faster than the number of taxpayers, there will be intense, politically irresistible pressure to continue paying benefits by raising payroll taxes and income taxes. But taxes won't be enough to save Social Security, because Medicare and Medicaid are also going broke, and payments on all the debt are skyrocketing.

Social Security was set up to have each person pay for somebody else's benefits. Current payroll taxes go to pay current Social Security benefits, and nothing is set aside for the future retirement of people working now. In the past, when current payroll taxes exceeded current benefits, the Social Security Administration used the surplus to buy special issue U.S. Treasury bonds. The surplus was mingled with the government's general funds and immediately spent on other programs. Now that Social Security is in deficit, the Social Security Administration will start redeeming those bonds, and the Treasury will draw on current revenues other than payroll taxes. Current Social Security beneficiaries believe they are entitled to their checks, but their total benefits tend to exceed the taxes they paid, and in any case their taxes were spent years ago. The money is long gone. There is no investment fund, no lockbox.

The flash point for Social Security could come when hard-pressed taxpayers conclude that even though they're paying monstrously high payroll and other taxes to support current beneficiaries, Social Security will be broke before they get any benefits. Nobody will be supporting them as they supported other people.

Outraged taxpayers will probably realize that they cannot both provide for themselves and continue paying for everybody else. It's a good bet that they will start trying to make up for lost time by building up their savings as rapidly as possible. Since it would be hard to increase income dramatically, it would be necessary to dramatically cut taxes they're paying for other people. Probably increasing numbers of taxpayers will work off the books, in the underground economy, beyond the government's greedy hands. By the time these things are happening, there could already be a flourishing underground economy due to inflation, price controls, wage controls, profit controls, exchange controls, import restrictions, rationing and other regulations. More people will do business in cash to avoid leaving a paper trail. There could be a resurgence of barter.

When most people hear about the underground economy, they tend to think of drugs, weapons or other disreputable things. But as government expands its power over our lives, all sorts of good things become contraband. Perhaps the most perennially sought after are compact, high-value goods that could be used as money. One smuggler moved Swiss francs across a border, hidden in Polish sausages. Or diamonds — James Bond's creator Ian Fleming wrote a book about diamond smuggling. Gold and silver coins are more popular, since less expertise is needed to determine their value. For decades, private gold ownership was restricted in the U.S. and other countries. Journalist Timothy Green reported that "gold travelled amid a clutter of goats and pilgrims on Arab dhows in the Arabian Gulf, or hidden in the engine casing of freighters outward bound from Hong Kong. One shipment of movie projectors into India was ingeniously filled with canapé-sized bars of gold, while 560 cans of motor grease swung ashore in Yokohama docks — laced with gold."

At one time or another, contraband goods have included coffee, cigarettes, watches, whiskey, spices, perfume, silks, motor oil, rare stamps and sex hormones. Whatever the principal reason for such illegal trade, it's unreported, and taxes aren't paid. The point here is that as the years go by, more taxpayers are likely to conclude that Social Security won't be around for them and that they must start providing for their old age by paying less in taxes. Federal revenues will fall as a result, accelerating the collapse of Social Security.

Such a scenario will remain a serious possibility as long as Social Security continues to be a system where a declining percentage of the population must pay ever higher taxes to cover everybody else's benefits.

The attempted attacks by would-be airline bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad opened a debate over the wisdom of reading a terrorism suspect his rights to remain silent and to an attorney under Miranda v. Arizona. Now U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has proposed legislation that "allows unwarned interrogation of terrorism suspects for as long as is necessary to protect the public from pending or planned attacks."

There are two serious problems with this proposal, one constitutional and one practical.

The constitutional issue is that even if this bill passes, it wouldn't mean much. Congress has tried to legislatively overrule Miranda before. The Supreme Court ruled in 2000 that the decision was a constitutional one, and therefore cannot be papered over by Congress. If the protection of Miranda is constitutional, presumably the scope is as well.

The practical objection is that Miranda doesn't need fixing.

The existing "public safety exception" to Miranda, approved in the 1984 Supreme Court case New York v. Quarles, is broad enough to cover emergencies created by terrorism plots.

The Quarles precedent comes from police officers responding to a rape call in Queens. The victim gave a description of her assailant, and told the officers that he was carrying a gun and had just entered a supermarket. One of the officers spotted the suspect, Benjamin Quarles, chased him down and discovered an empty shoulder holster that had held Quarles' revolver.

After handcuffing Quarles, the officer asked him where the gun was. Quarles nodded in the direction of some empty cartons and said, "The gun is over there." The Supreme Court subsequently ruled that this statement, made while Quarles was in custody but before police read him his rights, was admissible. The Court recognized that the exigency of a loose gun is a situation "where spontaneity rather than adherence to a police manual is necessarily the order of the day."

Supporters of Schiff's proposal to take Miranda out of play in terrorism cases will likely tell us that terrorism plots create dilemmas more serious than a revolver lying idle in the produce section.

What if the police had a bomb on their hands and only a recently captured terrorist knows knew how to defuse it? That's not a hypothetical, and the answer isn't to call Jack Bauer.

In 1997, NYPD officers raided an apartment where two men had constructed pipe bombs and planned to detonate them on a subway or bus terminal. During the raid, the police shot and wounded the bomb maker as he lunged for a black bag containing the explosives.

After bomb technicians discovered that a switch on one of the pipe bombs had been flipped, officers questioned the wounded bomb maker about the number of bombs, how many switches had to be flipped to set them off, whether there was a timer, what wires to cut to disarm them, and whether they were intended as suicide devices. The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit let all of the answers come into evidence via the public safety exception.

The public safety exception is settled law and has been ruled on by every federal circuit and over half the states, allowing police to deal with all manner of emergencies. Courts have allowed questions about the existence or location of guns, bombs, assault or kidnapping victims still in danger, accomplices and their identities, and plans for future crimes.

Add to this the fact that statements given before Miranda warnings are still admissible to impeach a suspect who changes his story when he gets to court, and that physical evidence obtained without Miranda warnings remains admissible.

So, here's a practical proposal: the above list ought to be distributed to counterterrorism task forces across the nation. Instead of spending time and energy on a measure that is out of Congress' power, have government lawyers create a pamphlet to educate the local, state and federal officers who will capture tomorrow's aspiring terrorist. Boil down the law to bullet points and put it on a business card so that they have it on hand when the next emergency unfolds.

That's a tool first responders can use.

Save taxpayers the election-year posturing, and perhaps a few lives in the process.

Despite occasional conciliatory language, the overall tone of the Pentagon's just-released annual report to the US Congress regarding China's military power seems more worried and confrontational than its predecessors, with the exception of the extremely hawkish version released in 2006 during the Bush administration's most militant phase. While American commentators generally have not interpreted the tone in that fashion, scholars and journalists in East Asian countries, especially Japan, certainly are doing so, and they express concern about a further deterioration in relations between Washington and Beijing. Such a prospect understandably agitates nations in East Asia, since it would inevitably raise tensions throughout their region.

In terms of substance, most of the major observations and complaints contained in the report are familiar ones. Washington once again objects to lack of "transparency," both with respect to the level of China's military spending and the nature of China's security doctrine.

The point about spending is entirely warranted. Beijing habitually understates the amount of its military budget. No credible Western analyst takes the official figure (some $71 billion in 2009) seriously. Numerous items, including research and development costs for major weapon systems — normal features in nearly every other country's defense budget — are not included in China's. Most independent estimates of Beijing's military spending conclude that the actual level is anywhere from 20 percent to 100 percent higher. The Pentagon's own estimate is that spending was approximately $142 billion in 2009, and will be "over $150 billion" in 2010. Interestingly, previous reports included both "low end" and "high end" estimates. In the current document, the low-end figure seems to have disappeared.

The complaints about the lack of transparency in China's defense doctrine are less legitimate. China does not give much detail about its military's goals and purposes, but that reticence is not all that different from most other major countries. Indeed, the same allegation could be directed at the United States, which Chinese officials and policy analysts have done from time to time.

Even less justifiable are the concerns expressed that China's overall military expenditures, and the development of certain weapon systems, seem to be more than necessary for the country's legitimate defense needs. That objection is especially in bad taste coming from the United States. Even if one accepts the Pentagon's estimate of PRC military outlays, they are still dwarfed by the more than $700 billion US military budget. China has a stronger case that it is Washington's spending and capabilities that are wildly out of proportion to America's legitimate defense needs.

With regard to China's apparent strategic objectives, the new assessment intensifies the warning in last year's report that while Taiwan remains the core issue for Beijing, China's ambitions now seem significantly broader. Specifically, the Pentagon notes the growing efforts to project power farther out into the Pacific and, increasingly, into the Indian Ocean. Perhaps the greatest worry expressed in the document concerns China's development of a new anti-ship ballistic missile with a projected range of nearly 1,000 kilometers. Such a weapon could put the US naval fleet, including the vaunted aircraft carriers, in the Western Pacific within striking distance.

That development would, at a minimum, complicate Washington's implicit commitment to intervene on Taiwan's behalf if Beijing sought to use force to compel the island's reunification with the mainland. Such a potent weapon, combined with the rest of China's military modernization program, could even raise the probable cost of any US intervention so high that no rational American president would incur the risk.

It is unsurprising that China would seek to expand its reach out from its homeland. Historically, that is what rising great powers do, and China is clearly a rising great power. It is also unsurprising that Beijing appears intent on developing the military wherewithal to settle the Taiwan issue on terms favorable to China. Both the Chinese people and the regime regard Taiwan as rightfully Chinese territory, and they view the return of the island to China's possession as the last remaining major piece of unfinished business from their country's long period of humiliation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Although Beijing clearly prefers to use economic incentives and other peaceful measures to entice Taiwan into accepting eventual reunification, the threat of force lurks in the background if a conciliatory strategy proves unsuccessful. Washington must face that reality, and US leaders must ask themselves whether preserving Taiwan's de facto independence is ultimately worth the risk of a nasty confrontation with China.

The new Pentagon report merely confirms that China is a rising great power with ambitions to match. That is an uncomfortable development for the United States as the incumbent hegemon in East Asia. And perhaps that accounts for the somewhat grumpy tone of the latest document. But China does not appear to be a malignantly expansionist power akin to Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or the Soviet Union. Instead, it seems to be a conventional great power seeking to shape the international system in a prudent way to its own advantage. Although that understandably creates some anxiety for the United States — and for China's neighbors in East Asia — it is an anxiety that can and should be managed. Unfortunately, the Pentagon report does little to advance such a goal.

The Invention of the Jewish People
by Shlomo Sand, Trasnlated by Yael Lotan
Verso, $16.95, 344 Pages

When I visited Greece in the summer of 2000, that state was in the midst of a heated debate about its national identity, closely tied historically to its national religion. Indeed, about 97 percent of Greece's native-born population is baptized into the Orthodox Church, which sees itself as the true guardian of Greek identity and traditions. But, in 2000, the European Union (EU) — Greece has been a member since 1981 — was putting pressure on the Greeks to follow in the footsteps of the secular members of the EU and take the historic step of accentuating the non-religious elements of its national identity.

The constitution of Greece recognizes the Greek Orthodox faith as the "prevailing" religion of the country; in fact, the blue canton in the upper hoist-side corner of the Greek national flag bears a white cross that symbolizes Greek Orthodoxy. And while the constitution guarantees freedom of religious belief for all, Greek citizens had for years carried government identity cards that stated their religion. So, by the end of the twentieth century, Brussels was demanding that Athens remove "religion" from the government's identity card.

During my visit, the debate over religion was reaching a climax of sorts. One Greek newspaper editorialized that Greece was experiencing "a profound identity crisis as it wrestles with what it means to be Greek, fundamental ties between church and state, and how Greek traditions fit in with the rest of Europe."

An American Jewish tourist from Marin County, California, whom I met at a hotel in Athens, was furious. "Could you imagine American citizens being required to carry government identity cards that name their religion?" she asked during one of our breakfasts. "And Greece is one of our closest allies," she noted. I surprised her when I mentioned that Israeli citizens also have to carry official identity cards that identify their religion and nationality. "But I thought that Israel was very much like us," she responded.

I recalled that exchange after reading Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People, a study of Jewish historiography that has ignited a lot of interest and some controversy in Israel and abroad. Sand, a professor of history at Tel Aviv University, challenges the biblical and conventional history of the Jewish people. He attempts to prove that Israeli Jews as well as those Jews who are citizens of other states are not the direct descendants of the ancient people who inhabited the Kingdom of Judea during the First and Second Temple period but include peoples that converted to Judaism during the course of history, mostly in the Mediterranean Basin and its periphery.

Countering official Zionist historiography, Sand questions whether the Jewish People ever existed as a national group with a common origin in the Land of Israel/Palestine. He concludes that the Jews should be seen as a religious community comprising a mishmash of individuals and groups that had converted to the ancient monotheistic religion but do not have any historical right to establish an independent Jewish state in the Holy Land. In short, the Jewish People, according to Sand, are not really a "people" in the sense of having a common ethnic origin and national heritage. They certainly do not have a political claim over the territory that today constitutes Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, including Jerusalem.

An intellectual committed to the secular and liberal traditions of the West, Sand criticizes the Zionist historians and ideologues — he suggests that Zionist historians are ideologues — who introduced a mythical conception of the Jewish People as an ancient race. He charges them with racist thinking. "Today, if anyone dares to suggest that those who are considered Jews in the world ... have never constituted and still do not constitute a people or a nation — he is immediately condemned as a hater of Israel," Sand writes. He contrasts the Zionist dogma that legitimizes the classification of Israeli Jews as members of the Jewish "religion" and "nation" in the government's identity cards with "civic" or "contractual" nationalism. This latter concept, developed by Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke, defines the nation as an association of people with equal and shared political rights and allegiance to similar political procedures. This sort of civic nationalism excludes religious, racial and even ethnic origins from the definition of the collective identity of Americans or, for that matter, the French and other Western societies. It is celebrated by liberal American-Jews (and non-Jews) like the one I met in Athens in 2000. They recognize that any attempt to impose a more exclusive definition on American identity that reflects the white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant origin of the founders would result in the political and cultural marginalization of American Jews.

But, as Sand demonstrates in his study, the ideology of Zionism is exclusivist — having more in common with the kind of "organic" (or romantic) nationalism under which the collective identity of the nation is based on a mix of language, race, culture, religion and customs of the "people." It excludes those who do not share them. An ideology of organic nationalism, reflected in the work of German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder, had an enormous influence on the nationalist movements of Eastern and Central Europe as well as the Balkans. Zionism was clearly a product of that kind of organic nationalism, a popular intellectual trend in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century, where Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, was trying to "invent," or more likely to reinvent, the Jewish People and create a national mythology. According to this story line, Sand writes, the people "who wandered across seas and continents, reached the ends of the earth and finally, with the advent of Zionism, made a U-turn and returned en masse to their orphaned homeland."

Is the development of that specific national mythology very different from those embraced by other national movements in Europe (and later in the Third World)? They fantasized about a lost Golden Age through which they could invent a grand historical narrative to help mobilize their people to action against the "other" — foreign occupiers and enemies — and provide political legitimacy for the establishment of a separate nation-state. In truth, contemporary Greeks and Germans are no more the descendants of, respectively, the ancient Greeks or the Teutonic tribes than Israeli Jews are the offspring of the Biblical Hebrews.

As a materialist who attaches more importance to the role of "real" political and economic factors in shaping history — as opposed to the ideologies that they produce and that leaders use as instruments to advance their interests — I am a bit skeptical about the power of ideologies or national myths to transform reality. Therefore, I find Sand's preoccupation with the topic less than useful and some of his historical research less than convincing. He does not really prove that the Ashkenazi Jews are the descendants of the population of the kingdom of Khazaria, who converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages. And his dismissal of new genetic studies that try to trace the ethnic origins of contemporary Jews (and other peoples) is not persuasive.

At the end of the day, the successes and failures of various national movements are determined by political and economic forces. Hence, notwithstanding their inspired national myths, the Basques and the Kurds have yet to win political independence, something that the people of Panama, a superficial entity created by the United States, have achieved. In the case of Zionism, it was the rise of anti-Semitism in Eastern and Central Europe and the ensuing Jewish Holocaust, coupled with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the British occupation of the Middle East that made the creation of a Jewish state possible.

Without buying into Sand's entire thesis, one could recognize (as I do) the devastation that Zionism and Israel have inflicted on the Palestinian people and endorse a post-Zionist vision of Israel under which it would become a state of all its citizens by embracing a more liberal conception of its collective identity, including by eliminating the archaic classification of religion and nationalism in Israeli identity cards. I will not be surprised, when Israelis and Palestinians resolve their conflict and create the foundations for new political entities and identities, if they also end up inventing new national myths to legitimize their projects.

The angry national debate over Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf's intention to build a mosque two blocks north of the horror of 9/11 at Ground Zero has been further fueled by supporter Nancy Pelosi declaring, "I join those who have called for looking into how ... this opposition to the mosque is being funded."

If one of her sleuths knocks on my door, this opponent will readily state that I need no outside funding as a reporter who is deeply investigating the motivation of Imam Rauf's choice of this site of mass murder for the mosque. I will add that, of course, all American Muslims have their First Amendment right to exercise their freedom of religion in their place of worship. There have been other mosques in New York City built without opposition. That freedom is not at stake here.

As for Rauf's inflammable site choice, however, one of a growing number of construction workers pledging they will not work on this mosque (New York Daily News, Aug. 20), Dave Kaiser, a blaster, explains:

"I wouldn't work there, especially after I found out about what the imam said about U.S. policy being responsible for 9/11."

Imam Rauf said was interviewed on CBS' 60 Minutes (Sept. 30, 2001) by Ed Bradley. (I have the transcript.) Asked how he felt as a Muslim "knowing that people of your faith committed this act," Imam Rauf spoke about Muslim reaction throughout the world "against the policies of the U.S. government, politically, where we espouse principles of democracy and human rights and where we ally ourselves with oppressive regimes in many of these countries."

"Are you in any way suggesting that we in the United States deserved what happened?" Bradley asked.

"I wouldn't say that the United States deserved what happened," Rauf answered, "but the United States' policies were an accessory to the crime that happened. ... Because (the United States has) been an accessory to a lot of — of innocent lives dying in the world. In fact, it — in the most direct sense, Osama bin Laden is made in the U.S.A."

Were the heads of government in Iran, Hamas and Sudan also "made in the USA?"

Imam Rauf has refused to call Hamas a terrorist organization and had no comment when, on Aug. 15, Mahmoud al-Zahar, its co-founder, strongly supported the Imam's mosque near Ground Zero, saying, Muslims "have to build everywhere" (Associated Press, Aug. 16). Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said the support by Hamas of the Imam's mosque carried no weight because "Hamas is a terrorist organization."

Why, yes, it is, Imam Rauf, with its suicide bombers and endless rockets into Israel. How else can suicide bombers be characterized?

This imam — widely lauded in much of the press as "a moderate" Muslim — is not reticent, however, in his firm commitment to Sharia (Islamic law), which regards women as far less than fully human. In the Dec. 9, 2007 Arabic newspaper Hadi el-Islam, Rauf insisted:

Throughout my discussions with contemporary Muslim theologians, it is clear an Islamic state can be established in more than just a single form or mold. It can be established through a kingdom or a democracy. The important issue is to establish the general fundamentals of Sharia that are required to govern.

I would greatly appreciate it if Imam Rauf explained, maybe Pelosi will ask him, more fully what he meant in his 2004 book, "What's Right With Islam is What's Right With America." In it he declares: "American Constitution and system of governance uphold the core principles of Islamic law." Rauf says Sharia law is a core principle of Islamic law. Does that also include a core principle of our Constitution?

This 2004 book's title in the English-language edition yields to a different title for non-English-speaking readers in Malaysia, reports Andrew McCarthy ("Rauf's Dawa from the World Trade Center Rubble," nationalreview.com).

This alternate title in Malaysia brings us right back into the civil war here about the imam's mosque near Ground Zero: "A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Dawa in the Heart of America Post-9/11."

What does "dawa" mean? McCarthy explains: "Dawa, whether done from the rubble of the World Trade Center or elsewhere, is the missionary work by which Islam is spread. ... The purpose of dawa, like the purpose of jihad, is to implement, spread, and defend Sharia. ... through means other than violence and agents other than terrorists."

As of this writing, Imam Rauf is on the State Department tour (financed by us) of Arab nations in the Middle East. He has been on four such State Department tours — two under George W. Bush. Says State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley (New York Post, Aug. 20):

"I wouldn't be surprised if he talks about the ongoing debate within the United States, as an example of our emphasis on religious tolerance and resolving questions that come up within the rule of law."

Does our State Department include Sharia as being within our rule of law?

At the end of that news story, we are told that Rauf "is not allowed to fund-raise on the trip." Yet, in the Aug. 18 New York Post, Geoff Earle and Tom Topousis report that "in an interview overseas, he (Rauf) said 'he would also tap Muslim nations for help.'"

I would not be surprised if Saudi Arabia ultimately becomes a generous contributor, but not quite in the agreement with the State Department's "emphasis on religious tolerance."

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg charges that opponents of Imam Rauf's mosque "should be ashamed of themselves" and are bigots.

Me, too, Mr. Mayor?

If you want to join Speaker Pelosi in investigating me, your honor, I'd be glad to oblige. I'm just doing my job as a reporter. I wish more reporters had gone beneath the shouting on both sides. There's another part of the First Amendment in addition to the free exercise of religion: The press is free to investigate the reasons for Imam Rauf's fixation on the 9/11 location of his mosque.

And why does this location make Hamas glow?