Searching for the Magic Kingdom. I took a few days off from the internet last week to spend some time with my family at Disney World, and I found the place, as I have found it since my early childhood trips to Fort Wilderness, almost overwhelmingly inspiring.

Disney World is not a theme park, or even several theme parks. Disney World is four theme parks, two water parks, a massive outdoor shopping district, over 30 resorts, and a robust web of free transportation including buses, ferries, a new gondola system, and the iconic monorail. It has a private security team, a small hospital, a fire department, a solar farm, and a hydroponic garden that produces something like 30 tons of food a year (which you can actually visit on a ride called Living with the Land at EPCOT, an underrated little bop I highly recommend). At about 25,000 acres, Disney is roughly the size of San Francisco, with 77,000 employees, a population of as many as 300,000 people on a given day, and around 60 million visitors a year. Wikipedia refers to it as “an entertainment resort complex,” which is probably an accurate, if grossly insufficient description of this little world within our world that Walt Disney dreamt up and created from cheap swampland and orange groves. But it functions more like a city, in both a practical and legal sense. In fact, it almost was a city. And in the story of this almost city’s birth and first few early steps, there is a path for us to modern greatness.

America can’t build. Because of this, housing is now expensive to the point it is pricing families out of existence, a high-level problem of problems impacting everything from overall well-being to the cost of labor, which further increases the cost to build more housing. Not only are we incapable of building new train tracks, we have actually lost something like 28,000 miles of rail since 1980. In 2025, megaprojects ranging in ambition from flooding the Salton Sea to bringing back Alaska’s Rampart Dam Project are discussed with the tone of your average conversation about aliens — sure, they’re theoretically possible, but nobody is expecting an extraterrestrial photo op on the White House lawn.

So how, in 1971, did an animation studio manage to build the foundation for a new city in the swamps outside of Orlando, while New York City, the de facto capital of our country, just barely managed a single subway line over the last five decades? There are lessons for us in the Magic Kingdom. Ground floor, if you want to live in a world where things are built, regulation must be designed with the goal of building, not the goal of “protecting,” and certainly not the goal of “conserving.” You also need a vision.

Today, I think we are close to a national vision. We are in this sort of primordial vision stew: new podcasts and newsletters and books with little dots of vision, sometimes framed as “the future of” this or that political party, sometimes instantiated in a new technology company. I even think there’s vision in some recent legislation, like the CHIPS Act for example, which I’ll return to in a moment. In his second inaugural address to the country, President Trump invoked “the Golden Age,” an evocative piece of rhetoric, and a kind of gilded vessel for a way forward, with ambition to reshore American manufacturing that certainly constitutes a piece of some grand vision. But none of this is enough to defeat our country’s great stagnation.

The “city upon a hill” has been an important concept in America from our earliest history, though it hasn’t referred to Boston for centuries. For a time, I hoped it might refer to San Francisco, and maybe someday it will. But for these next few years, I think there might be an opportunity to build our “city on a hill” from scratch. Disney gave us the blueprint.

Walt died fairly young at 65 in 1966, just a few years before the Magic Kingdom opened, and that first park of his in Florida tethered closely to his original vision. But EPCOT, which opened in 1982 — Disney’s “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow” — was never meant to be a theme park. It was meant to be a living experiment in urban design, and a real home for 20,000 people in a dense, futuristic, car-free urban utopia with underground transit, major corporate R&D centers, and a radical approach to property in the shadow of the suburban baby boom: namely, Disney would own the property, and people who lived in the city would rent or lease, so the company could constantly deconstruct and reconstruct units as technology matured. In this way, EPCOT would never be frozen in time.

Here, his original vision:

After Walt died, Disney’s corporate leadership decided to pivot — building a city? It was just too weird, they decided, too radical, too risky — and EPCOT became a park. Walt Disney World, by extension, became a very, very big park. A grand park. A modern world wonder in its own right, to be honest. But it lived on land that was meant to be a city, and the foundation laid for that city is how the corporation was able to develop so grand a tourist destination. Because Walt had more than a vision. He also had money, and a cozy relationship with the Florida state government.

When he set out to build, the first thing Walt did was quietly purchase Disney World’s original 25,000 acres through a couple of ambiguously named shell corporations. This was an essential step, as his brand was beloved at the time, and land speculation around projects associated with his name had already hamstrung their growth at Disneyland. But then, crucially, he created the Reedy Creek Improvement District, a special government district granted designation by the state, which let him bypass almost all state and local regulations while he built. He incorporated two small cities in the region to ensure RCID had legal backing to exercise broad municipal powers, and received a handful of exemptions from state environmental and development regulation of a kind that would allow him to completely reengineer the environment, and build out projects like the Seven Seas Lagoon (a man-made lake twice the size of Disneyland). From there, his strong relationship with Florida gave way to a variety of gifts in everything from friendly land classification, and thereby major tax breaks, to infrastructural development, including roads and such, to and around the park.

This was the closest America ever came to a charter city in the modern sense of that phrase. There had never been an attempt like it before Disney, and while there have been attempts to some varying degree since, none have succeeded. Frankly (and with love) none have even come close. Or at least not in America.

In 1980, just two years before the Walt Disney Corporation opened the theme parkified version of EPCOT, China designated a small fishing village of 30,000 people as its very first Special Economic Zone (SEZ). The purpose was to kind of test out capitalism within the context of a communist dystopia. And, surprise!, it worked. Today, there are 17 million people — or more than two New York Cities — living in Shenzhen, the country’s technology capital, a cyberpunk futurescape home to most of China’s major tech companies, fully equipped with all the advanced transport, housing, and R&D once dreamt up by Walt. And the country has repeated the strategy several times.

It’s no mystery how China was able to build what America once pivoted away from, and is now incapable of even so much as attempting. The country has a dictator. In order to meaningfully progress society, a man needs: 1) vision, and 2) the freedom to build. In a dictatorship, the leader has the latter and sometimes has the former (right now, in China, Xi Jinping has both). Today, America has totally paralyzed our free men. But there is at least a little bit of vision.

It somewhat randomly occurred to me this weekend that we’ve changed the way we discuss the goal of reshoring advanced chips manufacturing. Five years ago, it was considered hopelessly naïve. But today, while nowhere near chips independence, we’ve made incredible progress, and tend mostly now to talk about the effort in timelines. The question isn’t if we’ll get there, but when. I looked back at what I wrote about the CHIPS Act in 2022, and was pleased to discover most of what I hoped for at the time has since played out.

Despite the legislation’s many flaws, which I detailed at length in my piece, the spending bill outlined an actual goal, which the government then supported with money. Yes, it also lit a lot of money on fire. But it provided a clear path to collaborative development between the state and private industry, which seems to be working — if slowly. At the time, I detailed how the Act came together, from its early days drafted under Trump, to its signing under Biden, and illustrated a few things I’d like to see moving forward. For example, I thought it might be cool to see some kind of special federal zoning for manufacturing districts unencumbered by shithead regulators where Americans could process rare earth metals. Pirate Wires had just published another great piece around that time, Control the Metal, Control the World, which spooked me into focusing on the potentially existential problem we were facing as dependants on China. Three years later, these concerns have unfortunately proved prescient, with Xi now threatening to withhold REEs as an act of trade retaliation.

But if all we need is a flip of the pen from dear old Don to spin up a regulatory loophole somewhere in the country where we can start processing, we’re in business. And we don’t have to stop at REEs.

Today, almost every kind of physical manufacturing in the country is dragged down to the point of near infeasibility by regulators — a story now playing out even beyond the physical world, as the government attempts to hamstring progress in crypto and AI. Recently, Balaji called for a Special Elon Zone (SEZ), which would grant Elon broad regulatory freedom in a large swath of area around Starbase, Texas. The suggestion reminded me of our minerals bottleneck, and from my little Pirate-themed lagoon at the Caribbean Beach, my laughing niece and nephew out before me, a rum-based beverage in my hand, the idea began to blossom.

A golden idea for a golden age. (Donald, are you listening?)

If we have any hope of reshoring manufacturing, we need to crash the cost of housing, so we can decrease the cost to build. That means we don’t just need one special development zone, we need a network of special development zones. Connected by high-speed rail, or hyperloop, or autonomous motorpod network let’s say (I just made that up but do think it would be really cool fyi), itself governed along a special development path, to a new city. For fun, let’s go ahead and put all of this in resource-rich, land-abundant California, where the federal government is currently sitting on 6.3 million acres of federal land.

Mr. President, give me Disney’s 25,000 acres. Hell, give me half. And I’ll give you Golden City.

In or near Los Angeles, it might cost you around $3.5 million dollars to build a cute little middle class home in the style of the post-World War II American Dream. If you slashed the cost in land, regulatory hurdles, and labor, how much would it cost in Golden City? A tenth of that?

Now, with workers living in the city on cheaper property, we can also crash the cost of labor. What happens once we start building cheery little suburban homes at 10x less the cost of anything outside of Golden City’s limits? Either neighboring cities cut their regulation and lose their aversion to building (they won’t) or Golden City’s population booms. With a boom in population comes the benefit of scale, and now, for at least one small corner of the country, none of the cost-bloating regulation. Everything gets cheaper.

From here, we can keep developing: schools, transport, shopping outlets, leasing for restaurants. Let’s talk about hospitals on a plot of land where we just gutted most of our most cumbersome regulations — turns out the cost of operating an MRI machine, which you can train a monkey to do, is pretty close to $0 once you make it legal to operate an MRI machine. I’m not even speculating. In India and Poland, MRIs cost about a tenth of what they cost in the United States.

DOGE was a great idea, and don’t get me wrong we love to see a miserable bureaucrat around these parts. But firing miserable bureaucrats is not going to create an American Golden Age, and I don’t think Trump has enough political capital to activate Congress and really gut regulations across the country. But it would be much simpler to create new regions of the country untouched by psychotic anti-human regulation. To achieve the Golden Age, the federal government needs to collaborate with entrepreneurs, draft an actual plan for Golden City, pave the way clear of regulation, and fund the project.

We have three options as a society: stagnate and decline, assume literally dictatorial control of a city like San Francisco or Los Angeles and rebuild it from scratch, or free up a small fraction of federal land for development, and protect our special development regions with pro-building regulation. I’m not interested in the first option, and the second seems a little dicey? But Golden City has a nice ring to it, and the good news is we already know the recipe: find your Disney, and let him cook.

-SOLANA