Archive | July 21, 2009

Request for Emergency Help

STOP! READ THIS UPDATE.

NOW READ THIS SECOND UPDATE.

I’ve never asked for money on my blog before, but I’ve just been hit with a major financial emergency.

Several months ago, the Alabama Department of Revenue decided I’d underpaid on state taxes from ten years earlier. (I wasn’t aware of having done so, but I don’t have those records any more and so can’t prove otherwise.) After they’d added on interest and late fees, the total due was about $12,000. I submitted a request form to pay it off in installments; they never said yes or no to the request form, but I kept sending in payments and they kept cashing them, which led me to be more sanguine than in retrospect I should have been.

Then suddenly today, without warning or announcement (either from the tax department or from my bank), the tax department completely cleared out my checking account, and my savings account, and my mother’s checking account (I guess because we’re joint on it), leaving me $8000 overdrawn to boot.

I found out the money’d been taken only by checking my balance online today – and I had to go to the bank in person to find out it was a tax levy (the online balance had no information about who’d withdrawn the money).

My college salary doesn’t start up again until September, and I have no relatives from whom to borrow, so here I am with no money (or actually, negative $8000) for food, rent, or bills for the rest of the summer.

I haven’t had a chance to contact either the tax department or a lawyer yet (having spent the afternoon waiting and waiting at my bank), but I’m not exactly optimistic about getting a swift and favourable resolution.

Which is why I am desperately requesting help. If you can help, please let me know whether it’s a gift or a loan, and send either via PayPal:

or to my snailmail address:

Roderick T. Long
402 Martin Ave.
Auburn AL 36849


Radical Spencerians Online

Radical Spencerians like Auberon Herbert and Wordworth Donisthorpe represent an interesting bridge between the “capitalist” and “socialist” wings of libertarianism, palling around with the Liberty and Property Defence League on the one hand and Benjamin Tucker on the other (and being hailed by the latter as fellow anarchists – evidently the benighted Tucker had never had a chance to read the AFAQ).

Auberon Herbert, Wordsworth Donisthorpe, and Richard Harding DavisI see that Google Books now offers some previously hard-to-find works by Herbert and Donisthorpe. One is Herbert’s A Politician In Trouble About His Soul (1884), a presentation of political philosophy in dialogue form. The quasi-anarchistic last chapter is widely reprinted as a separate article under the title “A Politician In Sight of Haven,” but the full work has not previously been available online.

There are also four books by Donisthorpe: Principles of Plutology (1876), Individualism: A System of Politics (1889), Law in a Free State (1895), and Down the Stream of Civilization (1898). Of these the second and third have been available online for a while, but the first and the fourth have not.

Down the Stream is a memoir of Donisthorpe’s travels in the Mediterranean; his sometimes bigoted opinions can make it annoying (anomalously for a radical Spencerian and an anarchist, he was an apologist for British imperialism), but it is also witty and enjoyable, and makes a nice pairing with Richard Harding Davis’s somewhat similar Rulers of the Mediterranean (1894), also newly available on Google Books. Rothbard speaks highly of Plutology in his History of Economic Thought. Left-libertarians will be especially interested in Donisthorpe’s theories of “labour capitalisation” in chapters 6 and 7 of Individualism and chapter 8 of Law in a Free State.


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