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Ilana Mercer is a U.S.-based libertarian writer. She pens a weekly column – "Return to Reason" – for WorldNetDaily.com. Mercer is also an analyst and commentator for Free-Market News Network, founded by the late Harry Browne, one-time libertarian presidential candidate. Mercer contributes to other well-known websites, and has written weekly columns for the conservative Calgary Herald and Vancouver's North Shore News.

Mercer's work has also appeared in The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Free Life: a Journal of Classical Liberal and Libertarian Thought, the Foundation for Economic Education's Ideas on Liberty and in Insight On the News (an affiliate of the Washington Times), for which she has penned essays in symposia debating intellectual property. Mercer has written for the Financial Post, the Globe and Mail (Canada's national newspaper), the Ottawa Citizen, the Vancouver Sun, the Report Newsmagazine, the Colorado Gazette, the Orange County Register, London's Jewish Chronicle, the American Spectator, the American Conservative and the New Individualist.

Mercer's commentary has been mentioned in the European edition of Time (see "Trading Places" by Peter Gumbel, appeared in the print edition of March 28, 2005), and featured on websites such as the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, Laissez Faire City Times, Rational Review, Antiwar.com, VDARE.COM, and FrontPageMagazine.com. Mercer is the proprietor of IlanaMercer.com, as well as of the weblog Barely a Blog. In addition to her own commentary and readers' comments, BAB periodically features essays by prominent thinkers such as Thomas Szasz, George Reisman, Tibor Machan and others.

Mercer has been a guest on radio stations across America, and in 2003 she appeared on the Public Network's series, "America at War," #434, where she debated the media's dereliction of duty during the invasion of Iraq. Her analysis of Martha Stewart's legal travails, "Convicted for Fearing Conviction," was voted among the best Mises.org articles of 2004. In the same year, she received the "Ron Paul Liberty in Media Awards (LIMA)" for the WND column, "Wartime Socialism."

Mercer was born in South Africa, from where her father, Rabbi Ben Isaacson, was forced to flee due to his anti-apartheid activism. The family departed for Israel in the late 1960s, where Mercer spent her formative years. She returned to South Africa in the 1980s, married and had a daughter. The family immigrated to Canada in 1995, and then went on to settle in the U.S.

Described as an engaging, iconoclastic writer by National Post editorial writer Lorne Gunter, Mercer creates prose characterized by powerful analytical argumentation in support of her case. "A mind fiercely in pursuit of analytical truth" is how Peter Brimelow, author of the best-selling "Alien Nation," put it. In a review titled "The Passion of Principles," the Objectivist magazine The Free Radical called Mercer's book, "Broad Sides: One Woman's Clash With a Corrupt Culture," "a perfect mix of reason and rhetoric." Maryland's Ron Smith of WBAL Radio has described her as "a refreshingly original writer on the issues of our time." Others have praised Mercer as a particularly strong stylist, with "no less powerful an intellectual punch as Ayn Rand," only wickedly funny.

When she is not writing, Mercer enjoys running. Music is another passion. Chamber music and Bach – any Bach – are her first loves, but she finds the hard-core, intricate and masterful brilliance of progressive rock outfits like Symphony X, Dream Theater, Magnitude Nine and Kamelot as alluring, to say nothing of neoclassical wizards such as Sean Mercer and Tony MacAlpine.

Read Mercer's exclusive WorldNetDaily columns