Adding:

Your link implies that self-sufficiency can be accomplished in 2 acres of selective, intensive agriculture, which is a number I've seen a few places. If you delve deeper into it, you'll see that the hour estimates for that sort of lifestyle hover around 10-16 hrs/week for half the year, and 2 or less for the rest of it. This is a great book - it was reprinted in 1973, first published in 1929 or so. It still implies mechanized agriculture; you can subsist on 5 acres if you have a tractor, a truck to get your produce to market, and a house pre-built.

There's this real Chris McCandless vibe to a lot of young mens' concepts of self-sufficiency without really grasping that Chris McCandless starved to death 5 months into his odyssey even with someone else's hunting shack to live in. A more reasonable and sustainable approach can be found in Shannon Hayes' Radical Homemakers, which solves the investment capital quandary with "freeload off your friends and relatives until you don't have to anymore."

Which gets to the crux of the issue - money exists so that people without nepotism can function. If you have nepotism, you don't need money. Even then, subsistence farming is a job just like any other. Its hallmarks include difficult manual labor, long hours and outsized risk exposure due to weather, market forces, blight, etc. I love me some Mother Earth News as much as the next guy (had a letter published, in fact!) but even the most die-hard preppers will point out that self-reliance is hella hard work.

There's a reason jobs specialized. I'd much rather make hundreds of dollars a day pushing faders than averaging less than a hundred dollars a day milking cows. As a result, I arranged my education and experience to further that goal. That doesn't make me deviant, that makes me normal.