Well, the truth is that you could just go get a tent and live in a national park if you truly wanted to. You could build a houseboat and live on that. Or fuck off to the Alaskan wilderness. There are remote places you could live without having to pay any money.
You do realize that you still need to eat? Or going to a doctor or a dentist once in a while? Or at least buy some medication, or some shoes because the old ones are wasted?
Living in the wilderness is possible, but very, very hard. Only very few people are actually able to live like that.
You can get all that stuff for free in nearby towns and nothing is stopping you from hiking into town once a week for supplies. It's entirely possible to live for free if you wanted to. I've done it before, so I know the score.
I agree with you that living up in the Alaskan wilderness would be a whole different ball game. In most of the continental U.S., though, if you're close to a national park, it is possible. People do it all the time
Most towns give free food and clothing to the indigent, especially at churches. It's a true fact. Living in a tent in a woods is essentially doing just that and there are people who live their whole lives off of charity like that. You could, in principle, do it.
That is not scalable. Other people have to put in work to run a charity and community effort like that. If everyone is living off of charities, who is funding them?
It doesn't matter. We're talking about one person choosing to up and leave a broken system. Actually there are over 1 million homeless in the U.S. right now, and this is essentially how they live albeit most of them don't camp in national parks. Some do though