Thanks for your comment, Mike.

Each of us has a different idea of what living well means, and that's good. I'm a fan of cultivating virtue. Art and music are nice. I don't care to want people to emulate me (this is my life, yours is yours) and being pleasant is not my top priority either because it's overrated.

However, I demand to live life on my own terms. That's non-negotiable for me. Being genuine and real is very important to me.

A lot of people in this world lack for basic material and emotional needs. Virtue, art, music and pleasantries are the stuff of make-believe for them and states are a primary obstacle to resolving this problem.

If they didn't lack so much, many of them would be busy building things that would benefit me. That's the nature of a market economy. Inventor Y invents a machine to do X that costs $50 retail whereas he invested billions in creating it. I get his billions and years of work for just $50. How spectacular. And then the next guy builds on that.

The nation-state stands in the way of this kind of progress and we are all impacted negatively by it.

The only power any of us really has is decidedly local

Tell that to Elon Musk, Tony Robbins, Barack Obama, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Al Qaeda, etc etc etc.

In the future, intelligence and technology will enable savvy individuals to become hyper-empowered with influence far, far beyond any head of state of today. It's already happening with Musk, the Google founders, Zuckerberg, Satoshi Nakamoto and many others, both for good and ill.

Did any of these guys hold block parties or organize a litter pickup in the park before they started inventing? How ridiculous.

The very nature of capitalism is that it enables rapid change across an unlimited landscape, when people want it. To deny this is to deny capitalism itself. And I know you're not doing that.

This statement is indicative of a fixed-state mindset. Growth is possible, unimaginable growth - unless of course you deny it and put your head down.

To say that trying to transform the world is folly is actually self-contradictory of you. You implicitly want to change the world, you just want to do it by putting your head down and focusing on the details closest to you. If that works for you, fine. Best wishes.

I'm a big-picture thinker. I'm pretty sure you're not. That's not a slight. We just have different personalities.

I add value by focusing on the big picture. To call that folly is to denigrate my main avenue for being useful. I think you're out of place with that and not just because it's easily proven to be factually wrong.

There is a story about how when they were building the space shuttle, they had to take into consideration the road it would be transported on from the western US to Florida. At one point, the road narrows to a mountain tunnel that is an old mule trail. There's a joke about the trip to space being limited by the width of a horse's ass.

But the point I'm making is that you have to look ahead to where you want to be, to your destination, in order to plan the right strategy for getting there. Had the shuttle engineers not done that, they would have made the shuttle too wide and years of work would have been wasted.

That's what I do. I look ahead. I make plans for how to get where libertarian anarchists (voluntaryists, ancaps, agorists, market anarchists, etc) want to go.

If you want to go there, I invite you to set aside your doubts and join the conversation about how to make it happen.