Books, Coffee, and Charity: The Carpenter’s Cup

Posted on July 27, 2023 by Sarah Perry

In the rural town of Butler, Missouri—birthplace of author and libertarian thinker Robert A. Heinlein—we found a small Christian bookstore with a big mission. Not only does The Carpenter’s Cup sell books, gifts, décor, and have a full hot and cold beverage menu ranging from coffee to fruit smoothies: they are also a major hub of charity for Bates County.

I spoke with Becky, one of the founders and owners. When I asked her who got the bookstore started, she said: “God did.” Becky and her sister Phyllis were both working as registered nurses when Becky felt inspired that someone should start a Christian bookstore in town. At the end of 2015, Becky quit her job as a nurse and took the leap of faith to get her bookstore dream started and christened it The Carpenter’s Cup. Her sister Phyllis and their 90 year-old mother also work in the store.

Almost immediately, people in need began flocking to the new Christian bookstore for help with food, bills, clothing, and other necessities. Becky says she thinks they thought it was a church at first. The local Ministry Alliance of pastors from various churches asked if they could hand out utility vouchers at her bookstore. She only agreed after they promised that background checks at the police station would no longer be required for the vouchers, and there would be no policing of the morality of the needy people as well. “That’s none of my business,” she said, referring to Christ’s ministry feeding the hungry and helping people no matter how righteous or wicked other people thought they were.

There is great need in the Bates County area. But as Becky says, “a lot of people want to help, they just don’t know how.” The Carpenter’s Cup now facilitates all kinds of charitable programs. They began Project Hand Up, a 501c3 dedicated to assisting the needy. They have a Blessings Box outside their door—a cabinet someone built and donated for people to put shelf-stable food into and take as needed. Inside, they have fridge space for perishable food donations. In this rural setting, many people bring produce straight from their gardens and eggs from their own backyard chickens and ducks. Even the local Walmart sends food donations monthly, and if anything is expired, the food is still usable to people who keep chickens or other livestock.

I asked Becky how they made it through the Covid lockdowns. She said people volunteered to pay their rent and utility bills while they had to close. And even though they were closed, people still brought in food and entire prepared meals for the needy. People in need would come pick up the food, or if they couldn’t, a volunteer would deliver it. In the summer of 2020, they began a lunch program for school-aged children. This soon expanded to anyone who needed lunch. The food is provided by individual donors as well as the local Sonic and McDonald’s, and then served at the local park and the town square. Becky estimates they served 4000 lunches that summer.

The Carpenter’s Cup also provides backpacks with school supplies for families in need, and when they can get enough donations, new shoes and socks for school-aged children. For Thanksgiving, they fill laundry baskets with a turkey and all the ingredients for a delicious Thanksgiving feast for people to pick up. Last Thanksgiving (2022), they provided 500 meals. In the winter, they collect coats and warm gear for the homeless, working in conjunction with Jeff Moore, whom VIA donors assisted with this effort last winter (February 2023). In the summer, they collect fans and small air conditioning units to distribute.

In this blazing Missouri summer, The Carpenter’s Cup greets you with a handwritten sign on its door stating: “FREE ICE WATER.” The bookstore has had people sleep on its store floor before. Becky laments that there is not a homeless shelter in Bates County—it’s a sore need that has yet to be filled with numerous homeless camps in the area. But they do what they can, and the impact is widely felt. It’s sad to see so much need, but heartening to see so many people who want to help and have done so much without government coercion.

IRS Rewarding Charity Efforts by Stealing $16,000

Posted on April 23, 2021 by Sarah Perry

When the government began its destructive response to the COVID-19 outbreak, Louis Goffinet determined to help his neighbors weather the storm. But no good deed goes unpunished, and now the IRS is demanding that Goffinet pay more than $16,000 in taxes for helping the needy.

As the Hartford Courant reports, in April 2020 Goffinet started a fundraiser on Facebook, asking his friends to chip in a few dollars to help buy food for struggling neighbors that the government put out of work. By the time summer hit, more than $30,000 had poured in. Goffinet, a middle-school teacher who was stuck at home doing Zoom classes, used the money to buy and deliver food, help with rent, and buy gasoline for over 100 families in Connecticut.

The University of Connecticut hailed Goffinet as a “local hero”. A local Dominos Pizza began chipping in with pizzas for the recipients of the donated funds. Goffinet started a second fundraiser, which gathered another $10,000 in donations.

Everything seemed to be going great for Goffinet’s charity efforts—until he got a letter from Facebook telling him that he owed about $16,000 in taxes on the donated money. The IRS requires third-party transaction sites like Facebook to issue a 1099-K form on transactions greater that $20,000. And unlike ordinary people, the IRS is evil and does not care that Goffinet spent the money on needy families.

Goffinet told the Hartford Courant that he was “shocked” to receive the bill. “It’s such a big amount. It’s not like I can say, ‘Oh, for the next month or two, I’ll dial down my expenses and I’ll save $16,000.’”

Yet, unless he can get enough new donations to help cover the amount demanded, that’s exactly what he’ll have to do—or face confiscation of his property by the IRS. Registration as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization could conceivably have helped Goffinet avoid the tax bill, but that’s no small task.

At Voluntaryism In Action, many hours every month are devoted to filling out paperwork to keep our tax-exempt status. This isn’t reasonable for anyone, let alone a 27-year-old science teacher who’s just trying to help his neighbors. And this isn’t the first time that the government has tried to hurt people who’ve helped others during the pandemic. But this is yet another way that the government victimizes people: by punishing those who are efficient at providing aid to others—when they do not follow the government’s arbitrary rules.

Unschooling and Voluntaryism

Posted on April 3, 2021 by Sarah Perry

It’s safe to say that people in the liberty movement are fans of alternate school choices—the farther distance from government involvement the better. Private schools may be a good fit for some families, but they are still subject to the same government standards as public schools. Charter schools have this same requirement in most regions, but are an appealing option because they give you funding for your educational needs. While this funding does come from the government through the charter, one could easily view it as a personal tax rebate. Although charters do give you a bit more freedom of choice than public or private schools, the option that is most customizable is homeschooling. (Look up your local homeschool laws here.) Unschooling and voluntaryism are a perfect match. Unschooling—one of the many ways to homeschool—is most in line with voluntaryist philosophy and will help you teach your children by personal example how to live a life fully rooted in consent-based interactions.

Just as consent is central to voluntaryist philosophy, the same is true of unschooling. Unschooling is interest-based and child-led. While not being permissive or neglectful, parents allow their children the freedom to decide what to study and when. Subjects are learned holistically instead of being artificially separated. Emphasis is placed on helping children develop a lifelong love of learning by making it a natural, unforced part of the family culture. For example, simply by reading aloud to your children often and keeping plenty of interesting reading material handy, children even learn how to read on their own—no phonics books, no sight-word drills, no setting timers for forced daily reading practice. Instead, they get the satisfaction of accomplishing this themselves and the natural pleasure derived from reading what you like when you like.

Reading is perhaps the most common educational concern parents have for their children no matter what method of schooling they choose. Because of the very strict government expectations for reading levels at government schools, many parents struggle with the thought of giving their children this much freedom. It is my belief, however, that following the government’s lead on when and how to teach reading—the way most parents are now used to being the one and only process—poses far greater risks. When children are forced to learn something, they naturally resist, and it could cause an early and lasting dislike for reading. Additionally, government schools tend to push reading earlier than when many children have the brain development needed for decoding the printed word—again, causing unnecessary frustration for parents and children alike. This earlier push for reading also encroaches on children’s free play time, which is the best and easiest way for children to learn many things and should be tampered with as little as possible. In this way, the unschooling way of learning how to read follows the child’s natural course of development.

In John Holt’s famous work How Children Learn, he was one of the first teachers to study the natural language development in children from infancy. He makes the connection that if spoken language were broken down into bits and taught to children in the same way that reading is, a natural process would become an extremely difficult one. He hypothesized that if reading were allowed to be learned holistically the same way children learn how to speak, the process would be far easier and more rewarding for children. He also observed that children are naturally self-correcting, so if parents will take a step back and allow them more freedom to make mistakes on their journey to literacy, they will be able to manage most of the difficulties on their own. More recent studies have shown that whether a child is an early reader or later reader (even up to age 14 being in the normal range) makes no difference in their overall proficiency.

The next most common concern parents have with unschooling is that their children won’t choose to learn what the parents want them to learn, or what parents think they need to learn. As Connor Boyack explains in his book Passion-Driven Education, not all children need to learn the same things. In this book he offers great ideas for changing your expectations, thinking outside the box of standardized government schooling, and making life an educational journey. Children develop in different ways at different times from each other, making it futile to standardize their educational experiences. Even within the same families, what works for one child may not necessarily work for their siblings.

If voluntaryist philosophy is important to your family, unschooling your children is the best way to live those values consistently. By giving your children appropriate freedom of choice and becoming their educational facilitators instead of their masters, you demonstrate to them that consent is important in all facets of life and in every kind of relationship—not just our relationship to government. And speaking of government, what better way to put more distance between their constant interference and your family?

VIA is assisting low-income families with homeschooling resources and supplies—please click here to apply or to donate to this cause!

VIA’s Second Annual Holiday Food Drive–Part 1

Posted on December 7, 2020 by Sarah Perry

One of our favorite holiday traditions here at Voluntaryism in Action—our annual fundraiser for holiday meals—was a huge success this year. Our donors helped us almost double what we raised last year, and we collected almost $9k.

More families need help putting food on their tables than ever right now due to government encroachments on natural liberties, including the right to simply go to work. Voluntaryists everywhere have proven their principles by stepping up to help while these basic difficulties are so widespread.

With these funds, the VIA team purchased essential items for food banks across the country, including St Jude Food Pantry and St Moses the Black in Detroit, Michigan and the Food Bank of Contra Costa & Solano in California (the only food bank operating in the entire Bay Area due to government restrictions). Our team personally delivered over 1,500lbs of food! On the individual level, through our website and personal referrals, we assisted 30 families with groceries in time for Thanksgiving.

Watch for our holiday meal assistance forms to re-open soon in time to help with meals for Christmas, Chanukah, and other festive December meals!

September-October 2020 Organizational Update

Posted on November 1, 2020 by Sarah Perry

Voluntaryism in Action continues to grow! This autumn saw us adding more team members to our ranks: Steve Williams–our new multimedia expert, and Amanda Strong—our new administrative assistant. Steve will be helping us produce more educational and informational content to reach more people with the message of voluntaryism, and Amanda will help our overall efficiency.

Our summertime campaigns were big successes! Below is a brief summary of them and some other things we’re currently working on.

With the over $5,000 raised from our homeschooling and distance-learning education campaign, we directly supplied 69 students in the United States to help them get the most out of their education in difficult circumstances.
We also sent cryptocurrency to Kids Compassion Charity in Freetown, Sierra Leone to pay for school supplies for rural needy children.
Our essay contest for a higher education grant is set to close on October 31 with the winner to be announced in the coming weeks.
We raised over $10,000 for our “Free our Children” campaign to fight child sex trafficking which we granted to organizations who are specially equipped and trained to rescue victims and provide necessary aftercare: Operation Underground Railroad and The Demand Project.
An important milestone we hit this fall was being awarded our first grant! The Homeschool Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) granted VIA $4,500 to directly assist homeschooling families with educational expenses. We will be rolling out this program in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!
VIA just launched our second annual holiday food drive, and we’ve already surpassed our goal from last year! We will be using these funds to help feed needy families and supply food banks during their busiest season.
VIA’s podcast, “A Voluntary View,” is now available on multiple platforms, including Spotify, RadioPublic, and Google Podcasts.

Our donors are what make all of these projects possible, and we can’t thank you enough for your support! Great things are in our future, and we’re excited for you to be a part of this with us.

VIA Assists Homeschooling and Distance Learning Students During COVID Lockdowns

Posted on October 15, 2020 by Sarah Perry

In late July, the Voluntaryism in Action team launched our first fundraiser for one of our core causes: Education Initiatives. For this education campaign, we focused on assisting families through the unprecedented difficulties the government created surrounding the COVID-19 debacle. As Frederic Bastiat famously wrote, politicians and unelected bureaucrats didn’t take into account the “unseen” consequences of their hasty and draconian decisions, which disproportionately affected low-income families who weren’t prepared to teach their children at home and who rely on the public school system to provide many school supplies.

VIA was able to raise over $5,000 in direct donations for homeschool and distance-learning supplies for families in need. With these funds, we directly helped 69 students in the United States equip themselves for their educational goals this school year. In addition, we partnered with Kids Compassion Charity in Freetown, Sierra Leone by sending them cryptocurrency to pay for school supplies for local needy children. We are also able to offer our first higher-education grant which will be awarded to the winner and runner-up of our essay contest, which will close on October 31.

This autumn, VIA was awarded a $4,500 grant from the Homeschool Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) to specifically assist the influx of new homeschooling families. The dissemination of this aid is ongoing, and we continue to work with families directly to assess and supply their specific needs. In addition to providing school supplies for homeschoolers, VIA also created resources for families new to homeschooling to help set them up for long-term success.

Even without any kind of crisis to exploit, the government and its associated bureaucrats make decisions all the time that do not take individual difficulties and needs into account. Thanks to our generous donors, VIA was glad to step in and help.

Rebuilding Small Businesses

Posted on July 19, 2020 by Sarah Perry

2020 has been one hell of a year for small business owners. Already hurting from COVID-19 restrictions and mandates, small businesses across the United States were again hit hard during the riots that followed the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

Thanks to our donors, Voluntaryism in Action (VIA) raised close to $30k to aid small business owners in their cleanup and rebuilding efforts. Funds were sent directly to Emily’s Eatery, Midori’s Floating World Cafe, Coco & Family Beauty Supply, and Lake Street Stop n’ Shop of Minneapolis, as well as Top Cut Comics in Illinois and Marza Jewelers in Atlanta, Georgia.

I personally spoke with Anna, the owner of Emily’s Eatery, and she was so immensely grateful for the financial assistance we were able to offer. Although many members of her community had been volunteering in the cleanup effort, she had been getting nowhere with insurance.

We hope all of our followers and donors know what an incredible impact they have when they share our causes and become donors. Not only are you helping lift your fellow man, you’re also helping spread the message of voluntaryism and the love of liberty across the world. When people see us living our values, they are more likely to listen to our philosophy and consider our ideas viable.

Thanks again to our donors for assisting us with this successful campaign to rebuild small businesses. We couldn’t do what we do without your support!

What are Natural Rights?

Posted on March 15, 2020 by Sarah Perry

We’ve all heard of Rights: Equal Rights, Human Rights, and various types of political or social “rights” du jour. Amazingly, there are many people who have never heard the term “natural rights” before and don’t know what that means, or don’t have an accurate and clear understanding of what rights are because the term is so often misused. So what are natural rights?

Philosopher John Locke wrote extensively and passionately about natural rights, which include the right to life, liberty, and property. Locke asserted that these rights are inherent in our nature as humans. This means they cannot be given nor taken away by any governments, politicians, nor documents such as the Constitution of the United States or the Bill of Rights—we simply have them.

Other natural rights that stem from Locke’s trifecta include the right to self-defense, the right of free movement, the right of privacy, the rights to free and independent thought and speech…the list can go on and on. Essentially, the key to remember here is that a natural right is something that you have the power of choice and action over that does not use force or coercion on others. As Ayn Rand wrote in her book The Virtue of Selfishness: “Remember that rights are moral principles which define and protect a man’s freedom of action, but impose no obligations on other men.”

Right To Life

“All mankind…being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.” —John Locke

By your own efforts, you have the right to work to obtain food, housing, and healthcare. Something that often gets muddled in discussions about this natural right is that some people think these things are owed to them by society. But something is not a true “right” if you use force or coercion to take the things you want and need from others, because that would be encroaching upon their natural rights.

You do not have the natural right to slave labor, which is what you are advocating for if you are demanding food, housing, healthcare, and other life-sustaining goods and services to be given to you for free. Ayn Rand put it this way: “No right can require the material implementation of that right by another man.”

Voluntary exchange and mutual cooperation ensure that everyone’s natural rights are respected, and the more the state can be kept out of transactions between consenting individuals the more freedom, prosperity, and higher quality of life everyone can enjoy.

Liberty

“I have no reason to suppose that he who would take away my liberty, would not when he had me in his power, take away everything else.” —John Locke

This is a word that some people often misuse in a similar way to the word “rights.” They talk about freedom from poverty, freedom from hunger, freedom from debt, etc. Others think of freedom as the license to do anything, without consequences. Both of these approaches are mistaken.

Poverty and hunger are the natural state of humans, and “freedom” from them makes as much sense as talking about freedom from youth or old age. Debt is something that is voluntarily undertaken, and to be “freed” from a debt voluntarily incurred is as silly as saying that you’re “free” from a restrictive piece of clothing you put on—true in a literal sense but not a philosophical one.

The “freedom” from the consequences of your actions is not freedom or liberty at all, because with that liberty you would be able to kill, steal, and enslave others with impunity—not liberty at all, but tyranny. Liberty can only be liberty if everyone possesses it, and so the only possible meaningful definition of liberty is that it is liberty from the interference of others—including the state.

Freedom from the state is important for the preservation of liberty and the other natural rights of individuals. This is what some of the Founding Fathers tried to guarantee with the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights, but as Lysander Spooner wrote: “The Constitution has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it.” Sadly, the only person who truly has the power to defend your personal liberty is yourself, and no government office can be relied upon to safeguard this treasure.

Property Rights

“Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself.” —John Locke

Writer and economist Murray Rothbard has argued that all natural rights can be traced back to property rights alone: your body is considered your property, therefore you have the natural right to consume whatever you wish and move your body wherever you wish (so long as you respect the private property rights of others).

You have the natural right to preserve your body (your property) via self-defense. Owning property such as land gives you the means to provide life-sustaining food and shelter for yourself. The work of your body—physical and mental—can be traded with other people for property, including food and shelter.

Natural Rights and Voluntaryism

What does this have to do with voluntaryism? Voluntaryists believe in social and financial transactions based strictly on consent. This is completely in line with respecting the natural rights of others and ourselves.

The more you understand about natural rights, the clearer it becomes why we should assert them and defend them. A society free of force and coercion is a society firmly rooted in an understanding of natural rights, and a voluntaryist philosophy naturally and effortlessly follows.

What is Voluntaryism?

Posted on February 3, 2020 by Sarah Perry

Writer Auberon Herbert coined the term “voluntaryism” in the 19^th century. A classical liberal philosopher and individualist, he was an advocate for individual liberty, private property, and voluntarily-funded government. He argued that government should never initiate force and should only be a vehicle for defending individual rights. In his essay “The Principles of Voluntaryism and Free Life,” he writes that in a voluntaryist society “the state employs force only to repel force—to protect the person and the property of the individual against force and fraud; under voluntaryism the state would defend the rights of liberty, never aggress upon them.”

Voluntaryism is a philosophy based on consent consistently applied in all human interactions. Consent—uncoerced, positive agreement—is an integral part of a society based on natural rights, including freedom of association, private property, and self-defense. This sounds great to most people when they first hear it, but some struggle when applying this consent-based philosophy in all social practices—perhaps especially when it comes to taxation.

Voluntaryism rejects forced taxation as a valid mode of funding governments and their social programs because it is impossible, as things are currently organized, to obtain consent from each individual—not only in the appropriation of these funds, but also in the ways taxpayer dollars are used. Under taxation, pacifists are forced to fund war, vegans are forced to subsidize dairy farmers, pro-life advocates are forced to fund abortion providers, homeschoolers are forced to fund government schools they don’t use, and everyone is forced to pay the salaries of the unelected bureaucrats who administrate these operations. There are too many examples of conflicting interests to even list because individuals vary too much for central planning to accommodate everyone in a truly ethical way.

If at some point in the future we could individually opt-in to the government services and programs we wanted to pay for and opt-out of the ones we don’t like, and create what Herbert called a “Voluntary State,” that would be a different story! But for now, the voluntaryist philosophy states unequivocally that taxation is theft. What the money is used for, whether we like and use or benefit from the programs it funds or not, does not change this fact: that if you refuse to pay your taxes you will be robbed of property, forcibly jailed, and/or killed by the state. There is no consent, and it is not voluntary. The voluntaryist will assert that this kind of aggression and coercion against individuals is immoral. Force and aggression, according to voluntaryism, are only appropriately applied in self-defense of person and property.

VIA’s mission is to show the world that voluntary philanthropy is not only already extremely common, but much more efficient than government welfare programs (which divvy out pennies for every dollar they appropriate), as well as being the most moral way to provide charity. We reject the state’s use of coercion, force, and aggression—even when their gains are used to help the less fortunate. We are here to show the world that we can provide ethical, direct charity to individuals in need with the consent of all parties involved, through purely voluntary interactions.

Voluntaryists Help Hundreds of Needy Children

Posted on January 28, 2020 by Sarah Perry

Many families struggle to merely make ends meet during the holiday season and don’t have anything extra to buy gifts for their children. We at Voluntaryism in Action wanted to help as many children as possible have a magical holiday, so we launched our inaugural Jolly Voluntary Toy Drive. In record time, we were able to raise more than $5,000!

The VIA team reached out to our local communities as well as the VIA Community group on Facebook, and we found several individual families in need whom we were able to directly send gifts to for their children. We used the rest of the money to buy toys for Orchards Children’s Services, an organization that helps foster children find parents in Detroit and Flint Michigan. Once again, we at VIA were able to make a difference in people’s lives—thanks to our generous donors!

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