What Happened to the Annual Indexes for The Freeman?
The Freeman was the grandfather publication of modern libertarianism. It began to be published by the Foundation for Economic Education in 1956. It is still being published.
It is therefore one of the crucial resources in understanding the libertarian movement. It is also a treasure trove of excellent articles.
Unfortunately, some editor of The Freeman decided to eliminate the maps to the treasure. Here's an example. This is a reprint of the December issue of 1972. The December issue always contained the crucial resource: the index of the entire year's articles, authors, and subjects. Take a look at the PDF. The index is missing.
I thought: "Is this a mistake?" So, I checked 1973. Same thing.
I find this inconceivable. Why would the editor of the classic publication in the history of libertarianism not provide the indexes of the old issues published in the PDFs of the December issues? Why cut them off? It would have cost maybe $2 or $3 extra per issue to include them. Indexes would enable readers to find out the important ideas and topics covered through the entire year of the magazine.
Years ago, I put up the money to publish the PDFs of The Freeman on the Mises.org site. That was before FEE posted the index-free PDFs on its site. It was always FEE's policy to allow republication if the source was cited. With PDFs, everything is cited. You can get The Freeman here. Here is the issue for 1972. The index is included. This is the way to do it.
I planned to drop a note about this to Lawrence Reed, who heads FEE. Unfortunately, he no longer includes his email address on his identification page. He used to. I think this is a mistake, too. I have always had my contact information available on my websites, because I want to know if there's some mistake on the website. I want to get it fixed. I assume that mistakes will be made, and since I make them on my sites, I want to get them unmade.
So, if anyone knows Mr. Reed's email, please send him a link to this article. Someone at FEE has made a mistake. It should get unmade.
I hope he doesn't shoot the messenger. Messengers convey valuable information. That's what posted email addresses are for: to receive valuable information free of charge -- along with letters from cranks. But letters from cranks provide good copy for articles. For a recent example, click here:
All FEE needs to do is copy the PDFs of The Freeman on the Mises Institute's site and post them on FEE's. Simple. Cheap. Fast.
This will get the maps to FEE's buried treasure onto FEE's site.
Now, if someone can persuade the John Birch Society to post PDFs of American Opinion on its site, my writing of this article will have been worth it.