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.