To Whom it May Concern:
About a year ago David Gordon put out a list of a hundred books on liberty he believed merited special attention. As an author of quite a few books on liberty, beginning with the edited work The Libertarian Alternative (1973) and more recently The Passion for Liberty (2003) and the co-authored Libertarianism, For and Against (2005), I sent him a post complaining that he didn't list even one of my books, not even ones I edited featuring a host of libertarian luminaries. (Another such book would be The Libertarian Reader [1982]; there is also the series I edited for the Hoover Institution Press, Philosophical Reflections on a Free Society, which include ten volumes featuring four excellent essays in each mostly by classical liberal and libertarian scholars.)
At a blog (see below) some took me to task for making my complaint. Among other things the person said is that I made an ass out of myself by sending it. (Much of it is reproduced in the blog, so I need not reiterate my points.)
What is odd is that my effort to promote my work would meet with such hostility from someone who supposedly admire the free society and the free market. What about advertising, what about promotion, what about marketing? My complaint was a species of advertising--I was hoping to encourage David Gordon to pay more attention to some very good work on liberty produced by me. Or did it upset the blogger that I consider some of my work very good? Give me a break--what else is one to expect from the producer, creator of products and services?

Tibor Machan
http://remarq.blogspot.com/2005/06/tibors-tantrum.html