Reply #33: Surely you are not as naive as you sound in this post.

[MineralMan]

Could you build your own house? From scratch? And by from scratch I mean that you start with a bare piece of ground and nothing else. From that beginning, you have to create everything required to build your house. You don't have tools, because someone, somewhere has to make those tools. You don't have lumber, because someone, somewhere has to cut down trees and turn them into lumber. No nails, no fasteners, no nothing.

I'm betting you cannot. If you cannot, then, can you enlist the help of others to build your house for you for nothing? Can you get them to supply you with materials without any exchange? I doubt it very much.

Now, here's the thing: If you could find a small plot of ground, near a stream and a source of clay, you could, indeed, build your house from scratch. You could make your own tools by using basic stone knapping techniques, which you could probably discover on your own, if you're very creative. With those handmade tools, you could probably build a structure of some kind that you could live in. There wouldn't be any glass windows, but you could create lighted openings by scrounging for glass bottles and imbed them in the clay.

So, it is actually possible to start with nothing and build some sort of house. But, it's really hard work. And then, there's the problem of the place you build it. You could probably squat somewhere, but finding such a place with water and clay and the other things you will need might be difficult. You might have to walk many miles to explore until you found such a place that nobody cared about. I know some spots in California where you could manage it, at least for a while.

It's a lot easier, though, to exchange labor for that bartering exchange medium they call money. You work and someone gives you something you can exchange for the things you need. Why do they do that? Because they have more work than they can do to earn their own way. So, you exchange some of your time for the stuff people exchange to buy things. A house will take a lot of that work, but, again, if you want to build your own, you can save some money. The exchange medium you gain from your labor can be used to acquire tools and lumber, etc. Then, you can build your house, if you have the time. If you don't, you can get some more of that exchange medium by working some more and have someone else build it for you.

Unless you are an unusually resourceful person, you won't manage to build your own house without money. In my younger days, I could have done so, but it wouldn't have been an attractive proposition. So, I exchanged my skills and my time for that exchange medium I mentioned before and bought an old house someone wanted to sell. Worked out fine, it did.