Upon my return from Christmas vacation at the end of December 2002, ISIL VP Jim Elwood broke the news. "Did you hear," he said sadly, "that Free-Market.Net has gone out of business?"

     This was the saddest news I had heard in many a year. I remember getting in touch with FMN CEO Louis James immediately to see if something – anything – could be done to save the day. Free-Market.Net had, without question, become in just five short years, the number one libertarian portal to the Internet. It couldn't die.

     In my mind and the minds of many others, the Internet has become the quintessential frontline of the battle for liberty – both in America and throughout the world – and libertarians have become the dominant voice on the Internet.

     And the FMN team were pioneers in achieving this dominance – front-line warriors in cyberspace to be sure. But there are definite dangers in being pioneers, as was now painfully evident.

     I remember how the late Bruce Evoy used to say, regarding the great struggles we had endured in building ISIL, "It was the earliest Christians who met the hungriest lions."

     And we at ISIL had enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with FMN, having been a FMN Partner organization for many years. And we had been collaborating on maintaining an up-to-date international contact list. In fact, the list of libertarian organizations and fellow travellers on the ISIL website was actually a link to FMN's extensive databases. And we had just taken FMN CEO Louis James on the ISIL Board of Directors at the ISIL board meeting at the Puerto Vallarta conference last year.

     Free-Market.Net going under was not unlike a death in the family.

     So what to do? Louis and I jammed a lot and I spread the word around among patrons of the movement to see if anyone could help – but no go. The amount of debt was far too much of an impediment. Happily a few generous and visionary folks (who were also long-time ISIL members) put up money to keep FMN operating temporarily during the crisis period.

     Several promising offers to buy out FMN fizzled. It didn't look good.

     Eventually on January 24th an on-line auction to raise funds by selling off the assets of The Henry Hazlitt Foundation (Free-Market.Net, Bureaucrash, and ifeminists.com) was held. This was designed to honor debt to creditors.

     Members of the ISIL Board agreed that we should join the bidding process in a long-shot bid to rescue Free-Market.Net from oblivion. By this time Bureaucrash and ifeminists.com had been spun off.

     To start the ball rolling, one generous benefactor threw $5,000 into the pot. ISIL threw in another $1,000. But $6,000 was peanuts considering the value of the organization.

     So January 24th was a tense time, with much fingernail chewing and checking in on the auction webpage every half hour or so to see what the latest bid was. But at the 11th hour an interesting development occurred. Creditors began forgiving large blocks of debt and pledged these amounts to the ISIL bid – which, by the time the smoke cleared, and bids were cut off (at midnight), ours was raised to over $30,000. That did it, putting us far in the lead. On January 30th much to our total amazement, we were informed that it was a done deal. The good news was made public on February 2nd (Ayn Rand's birthday).

     So if you haven't heard much from us in a few months, it's because we have been buried in the process of merging our operations and ironing out nut-and-bolts details (not to mention working on preparations for the Lithuanian). We're still at it – but one thing is for sure, and that is that we have a lot of happy (albeit exhausted) free-market campers here – and the world libertarian movement should rejoice.