[songzme]

> Everything has costs. Nothing is free. Public education funding has to come from somewhere so that educators can eat and classrooms can be built and maintained.

If you believe that, then it will be true for you. Alot of things are free. If you plant a potato you can end up with a whole field of potatoes that you can eat forever, for free. And all the potatoes you don't eat decomposes back into the soil and makes the soil healthier.

Nature is fundamentally free and abundant and I can't figure out why our society isn't. Everyone around me seems to conclude that nothing is free though so maybe there's something I see that others don't, or there's something everyone else sees that I don't.

[derrick_jensen]

Time has value, and economies of scale make it more efficient. I worked at a CSA for a while and the amount of time it would take an individual to have the diversity of foods we provide would have taken them far longer. I have nothing against gardening on its own, but the marginal value add of doing something else yourself doesn’t always exceed the value of your time and the opportunity cost of not doing something else.

You could always live an AnPrim lifestyle and that’s fine (one of Kaczynski’s main points was that specialization in the abstract is incompatible with people), but there are more obvious reasons why more people don’t do that.