Edited by former Atlas fellow and president of the Association for Liberal Thinking, Atilla Yayla, Islam, Civil Society, and Market Economy explores the relationship between Islam, democracy, and freedom in the civil society.

In this collection of essays, the authors seek to understand why Islamic countries typically lack a tradition of civil society, liberal democracies, and well-functioning markets.

What one reviewer called ‘a slim volume brimming with powerful new ideas’, the Association for Liberal Thinking book was praised by the Fisher Award judges for breaking new intellectual ground and instigating an important new debate.

Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, NS, Canada
Operating in the Dark: The Gathering Crisis in Canada’s Public Health Care System by Brian Crowley, David Zitner, and Nancy Farady-Smith
Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, Halifax, NS, Canada, 1999

Operating in the Dark traces the roots of the crisis in Canada’s public health care system to the monopolistic nature of the system and makes a convincing case for more competition and a greater role for private providers of health care services to ease the failing system.

The AIMS monograph hit a nerve with the Canadian people, who have been growing more and more uneasy about the failings of the Canadian health care system, and generated immediate response throughout the country. In addition to attention from the national media, the study was the focus of articles in several medical periodicals. Alberta Premier Ralph Klein noted the report in the Alberta legislature, saying it represented the direction that Canadian health care must go in the future.

The Independent Institute, Oakland, CA
To Serve and Protect by Bruce L. Benson
New York University Press, New York, NY, 1998

To Serve and Protect makes a controversial, but powerful, argument for more private (and less public) crime control.

Author Bruce Benson analyzes both the history of criminal justice and the accelerating modern trend toward privatization of the criminal justice system. The book examines the range of private-sector input in criminal justice, from private-sector outsourcing of prisons and corrections, security, arbitration and other functions generally performed today by governments, to full ‘private justice’ such as business and community-imposed sanctions, citizen crime prevention, and increased private security and self-defense.

As one Fisher Award judge said, ‘There can be little doubt that To Serve and Protect can be most effective in reaching the wider public and in impressing them with the cogency of the case for market arrangements in an area to which most readers will not have thought it to be relevant.’

Benson makes such a strong case for a seemingly difficult application, that one judged commented, ‘although I started from an outlook of some dubiety, I found myself persuaded by a surprising number of Professor Benson’s proposals ‘I eventually found myself strongly supporting such cost-effective proposals as private markets for criminal labor and greater scope for private prosecution before formal private courts.’

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