It seems the answer is no. Daniel Suelo went off the gird, literally. He decided to go live in a cave in a National Park. He gave up all of his money and worldly beings, and lived in the cave, not bothering anyone, right? Not so, says Suelo:

“Our whole society is designed so that you have to have money,” Daniel Suelo says. “You have to be a part of the capitalist system. It’s illegal to live outside of it.”

So what happens when a Park Ranger writes him a $120 ticket?

“If I were hiking along here and I saw this camp,” said the ranger, “I’d feel like I wasn’t allowed here, that it was someone else’s space. But this is public land.” The ranger wrote a ticket for $120.

“Well, I don’t use money,” Suelo said. “So I can’t pay this.” Not only did he not use money, he had discarded his passport and driver’s license. He had even discarded his legal surname, Shellabarger, in favor of Suelo, Spanish for “soil.”

The ranger felt conflicted. He’d spent years chasing vandals and grave robbers through these canyons; he knew that Suelo was not harming the land. In some ways, Suelo was a model steward. The ranger offered to drive him to the next county to see a judge and resolve the citation.

The next day, these odd bedfellows, a penniless hobo and a federal law enforcer, climbed into a shimmering government-issue truck and sped across the desert. As they drove, Suelo outlined his philosophy of moneyless living while the ranger explained why he had become a land manager– to stop people from destroying nature. “And then someone like you comes along,” he said, “and I struggle with my conscience.”

They arrived at the courthouse. The judge was a kindly white-haired man. “So you live without money,” he drawled. “This is an honorable thing. But we live in the modern world. We have all these laws for a reason.”

Suelo hears this all the time: that we’re living in different times now, that however noble his values, their practice is obsolete. He even heard it once when he knocked on the door of a Buddhist monastery and asked to spend the night, and a monk informed him that rates began at fifty dollars. The Buddha himself would have been turned away, Suelo observed.

“We’re living in a different age than the Buddha,” he was told. But Suelo simply doesn’t accept this distinction.

To the Utah judge casting about for an appropriate sentence, Suelo suggested service at a shelter for abused women and children. They agreed on twenty hours. Suelo volunteered regularly at the shelter anyway, so the punishment was a bit like sending Brer Rabbit back to the briar patch. And within a few weeks of eviction from his grand manor, he found a new cave, this time a tiny crevice where he would not be discovered.

He went Galt, proverbially.