Striking The Root. Essays on Liberty.

In this volume, Lawrence W. Reed identifies the root of many of America's evils today: a failure to recognize that government rests on the use of force. This fundamental feature of government may be a boon when used to protect our individual freedoms, but it is a bane when used to diminish these freedoms in pursuit of a political faction's idea of a good cause. This volume draws primarily on his past columns for The Freeman, an unpretentious magazine with a resonant voice that has reached some of America's most prominent people, including a onetime presidential hopeful named Ronald Reagan. In that tradition of plain speaking, Reed demonstrates that the clarion call of liberty will always find an audience, even in a world clamoring for chains.

Lawrence W. Reed is president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free-market think tank headquartered in Midland, Mich. He has served as president of the Center since it opened in 1988, and under his leadership, it has emerged as the largest and most prolific of the more than 40 state-based free-market think tanks in the United States. Reed is also a visiting senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation, and served as president and a member of the board of directors of the State Policy Network, an association of free-market organizations. Reed is author of more than 1,000 columns and articles that have appeared in dozens of publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Investor's Business Daily and The Detroit News. During the past 30 years, Reed has written more than 150 articles, columns or book reviews for The Freeman, the flagship periodical of the nonprofit Foundation for Economic Education, whose board of trustees he chaired for three years in the late 1990s.