Barnett provides a superb explanation about the crucial importance of written law and a constitution to limit the power of rulers. Barnett suggests that the Constitution be interpreted as contracts are interpreted, on the basis of their original meaning. One doesn`t do historical research about the intentions of the parties but simply determines the commonly-accepted meaning of contract language. A provocative book!

In this second edition, Sowell updates many examples and cites more international experience than in the original -- pointing out that prosperous countries with few natural resources (Japan, Switzerland) are as common as poor countries with abundant natural resources (Mexico, Russia). He provides a fresh explanation of how market prices enable an economy to work with extraordinary efficiency -- and what happens when government interferes. He discusses the unintended consequences of subsidies. He shows how government policies backfire, surprising many voters who had expected officials to deliver what they had promised. The book covers supposedly "progressive" laws that brought about the collapse of one of the world's most powerful nations.

"...since September 11, we are at war. Because the front line of that war is here, in America. Because when I was a war correspondent, I liked to be on the front line. And this time, in this war, I do not feel as a war correspondent. I feel as a soldier. The duty of a soldier is to fight. And to fight this war, I deploy a personal weapon. It is not a gun. It’s a small book, The Rage and The Pride.

"My soldier weapon is the weapon of truth. The truth that begins with the truth I maintain in these pages:

"From Afghanistan to Sudan, from Palestine to Pakistan, from Malaysia to Iran, from Egypt to Iraq, from Algeria to Senegal, from Syria to Kenya, from Libya to Chad, from Lebanon to Morocco, from Indonesia to Yemen, from Saudi Arabia to Somalia, the hate for the West swells like a fire fed by the wind. And the followers of Islamic fundamentalism multiply like a protozoa of a cell which splits to become two cells then four then eight then sixteen then thirty-two to infinity. Those who are not aware of it only have to look at the images that the TV brings us every day. The multitudes that impregnate the streets of Islamabad, the squares of Nairobi, the mosques of Tehran. The ferocious faces, the threatening fists. The fires that burn the American flag and the photos of Bush.

"The clash between us and them is not a military clash. Oh, no. It is a cultural one, a religious one. And our military victories do not solve the offensive of Islamic terrorism. On the contrary, they encourage it. They exacerbate it, they multiply it. The worst is still to come.

"President Bush has said, “We refuse to live in fear.”

"Beautiful sentence, very beautiful. I loved it! But inexact, Mr. President, because the West does live in fear. People are afraid to speak against the Islamic world. Afraid to offend, and to be punished for offending, the sons of Allah. You can insult the Christians, the Buddhists, the Hindus, the Jews. You can slander the Catholics, you can spit on the Madonna and Jesus Christ. But, woe betide the citizen who pronounces a word against the Islamic religion.

"My small book is not tender with Islam. In certain passages, it is even ferocious. But it is much more ferocious with us: with us Italians, us Europeans, us Americans."

—William Peter Blatty, author of The Exorcist

—George Kennedy, Academy Award winner

Stossel's legion of fans will enjoy learning how he ended up in TV journalism, after having graduated from Princeton and gained acceptance at a leading graduate school of hospital management. He overcame stuttering, a problem that would have doomed his broadcasting career.

Stossel tells how, after being recruited to WCBS-TV in New York, he defied his assignment editor who just wanted stories about government press releases, murders, and fires. He opted to report on major trends that affect our lives. He became an ace consumer reporter and was recruited to the ABC-TV network.

"The more reporting I did," Stossel writes, "the more it dawned on me that government is often the problem. Free markets, not coercive governments, are the consumer's best friend."

Gatto, the fabled New York City Teacher of the Year who made headlines when he turned against government schooling, reminds the historically minded of William Lloyd Garrison with his slashing moral attacks against government schooling.

He denounces it "as a gigantic indoctrination and sorting machine, robbing people of their children. . . . You aren`t compelled to loan your car to anyone who wants it, but you are compelled to surrender your school age child to strangers who process children."

"Government schooling kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents." He exposes the errors of "short-answer tests, bells, uniform time blocks, age grading, standardization, and all the rest of the school religion." Schools, he says, "don`t need more money or a longer year, they need free-market choices, variety that speaks to every need."

It is that movement, as epitomized in Dr. Chris Sciabarra's autograph, Ayn Rand, Homosexuality, and Human Liberation, (made available below), that is examined, detailing each issue, from the normality and morality of homosexuality itself, to the proper Objectivists approach toward questions of sexuality.

It is this book and its thesis that The Hijacking of a Philosophy above challenges.

"The book addresses two fundamental questions:

• "In what sense can Rand's philosophy be understood as a response to her Russian past?; and
• "In what sense can Rand's philosophy be understood as a contribution to twentieth century radical social thought?

"By answering these questions, I provide a new interpretation of Rand's Objectivism with regard to its intellectual origins and its significance for the history of social theory. It is my belief that Rand achieved a unique synthesis that emerged from her rejection--and absorption--of key elements in the Russian tradition. What she rejected was the Marxist and religious content of Russian thought. What she accepted was the dialectical revolt against formal dualism. In her distinctive integration of a libertarian politics with a dialectical method, Rand forged a revolutionary link. She projected a dialectical sensibility while formulating a fundamentally non-Marxist, radical critique of statism."

Even if the reader disagrees with Dr. Sciabarra's entire premise/conclusion, the historical research and background are required for any serious student of Ayn Rand's Objectivism.

The discoveries of Christopher Columbus were the necessary first step in the creation of the noblest, freest nation the world had ever seen. It is for this, Bowden concludes, that we should honor him. (Adapted from Rand Corle's Amazon review.)

Isabel Paterson was a friend of Ayn Rand, and a lover of freedom. (Adapted from an Amazon review.)

This book has been highly praised by conservatives, but, be warned, Johnson ultimately sees government as a solution, not the cause of most of the problems. If read critically, it is an enjoyable romp through American history.

In The Discovery of Freedom, she talked not about rulers marching through history books, but the epic 6,000-year struggle of ordinary people who defy rulers to raise their families, produce food, develop industries, pursue commerce and in myriad ways improve human life.

Lane celebrated the American Revolution which showed dramatically how ordinary people could achieve extraordinary freedom--and how they could do it again. "As human material," she wrote, our immigrant forebears "were nothing to brag about... Starving wretches lucky to escape debtors' prisons, vagrants from highways and slums who sold themselves to slavery for years to pay for their steerage passage across the Atlantic, peasants shipped like cattle, shiploads of hungry women and girls without dowries, auctioned in the ports to settlers who needed wives."

Reviving the radical spirit of Tom Paine, she declared that "Individuals began this Revolution... They acted as individuals, each man with his own knowledge of reality. The respected and respectable men were against him; the teachers, the thinkers, the writers of books, were against him; the important men, the rich men, all men in high places, stood with the King."

Only about a thousand copies of The Discovery of Freedom were printed initially, but the book inspired individuals who were to have substantial influence over the years. The Discovery of Freedom inspired the charismatic journalist and teacher Robert Lefevre who launched the Freedom School, an important stimulus for the libertarian movement during the postwar era. General Motors consumer researcher Henry Grady Weaver adapted The Discovery of Freedom as The Mainspring of Human Progress, and the Foundation for Economic Education distributed more than 400,000 copies. We at Laissez Faire Books have reprinted Discovery of Freedom before, and we're proud to help bring it back again--this time with a reminiscence by Lane's literary heir Roger Lea MacBride and a poignant memoir by Foundation for Economic President Hans F. Sennholz.

Who exactly was Rose Wilder Lane? Born in 1886, in the Dakota Territory, she grew up on Rocky Ridge Farm, the Mansfield, Missouri spread built by her parents, Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Following high school graduation, she got a job with Western Union, which took her to San Francisco. Later, she started her writing career, working for the San Francisco Bulletin.

After World War I, the Red Cross hired her to write about their activities in the Middle East, the Balkans and Russia, so she saw quite a bit of the world. She had mingled with American Communist Party founder Jack Reed and was close to being a Communist herself, but she sobered up after she encountered ordinary Russian people who hated Communism.

Meanwhile, she had started writing books--biographies of Henry Ford and Herbert Hoover, a fictionalized biography of Jack London, bestselling novels about pioneer life in the Ozarks. She encouraged her mother to write about the dramatic experiences of her childhood and helped with what became the beloved Little House books.

By the early 1940s, World War II raged on, and Lane decided to articulate her political views to a wider audience by developing her 1936 Saturday Evening Post Article, "Credo," into a book.

Fortunately, the publishing house John Day asked her to write a book on political philosophy, and she was off. She started The Discovery of Freedom in a McAllen, Texas trailer park where she had gone to gather material for some magazine articles. She finished the book at her Danbury, Connecticut home.

Ironically, she became dissatisfied with the book because of some historical inaccuracies and refused permission to reprint it until she completed a new edition, but work was cut short by her death on October 22, 1968. So The Discovery of Freedom became an underground classic. That stubborn individualist Albert Jay Nock had sagely observed: "When it comes to anything fundamental, Mrs. Lane never makes a mistake. She is always right. In this respect, the book is really remarkable." Now you can discover, or rediscover, Lane's exhilarating work.

Individual liberty is for anyone who pursues it. This book provides the insights for beginning that pursuit.