Trump vs. Clinton vs. Everything Good "Don't argue about it. Build the alternative.".

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine
• Position: Editor's Note: - Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton - Editorial

Just after midnight on July 18, Darren Charrier grabbed a surfboard, headed out past the breakers near Cape Canaveral, Florida, and settled in to wait. Before long, he got what he came for. His buddy--paddling just behind on his own board--documented the moment for Twitter. In the striking snapshot, Charrier is in silhouette, backlit by the flare of a rocket returning to Earth and settling upright on its launch pad.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Inspiring feats of aeronautics are not terribly unusual at Cape Canaveral, home to NASA's Kennedy Space Center. But this particular rocket doesn't belong to NASA. It belongs to Elon Musk, a man who is almost certainly both richer and smarter than everyone you know. His aerospace company, SpaceX, does have a contract with the U.S. government to carry several loads of cargo and hardware to the International Space Station. This mission, the seventh so far in 2016, successfully ferried a Dragon capsule loaded with two and a half tons of gear--including a handheld DNA sequencer-into low Earth orbit. But running a delivery service for the feds is merely a waystation for the co-founder of Tesla and PayPal, who has his eye on more radical experiments in living.

"I think it would be cool to be born on Earth and die on Mars," says Musk. He adds, "Hopefully not at the point of impact."

At the same moment Charrier was bobbing on the dark water, bathed in the glow of burning rocket fuel and Elon Musk's fever dreams, the rest of Twitter was exhaustedly signing off after day two of the Republican National Convention, which by that point had already been through a plagiarism scandal and an extended discussion of Hillary Clinton's

exact relationship to Lucifer.

The following week in Philadelphia served up the Democratic variant of anti-trade, pro-intervention, debt-denialist rhetoric, with donkeys in place of elephants and the word fair in the place of the word safe, alongside an awful lot of Donald Trump trash talk.

The stakes are undeniably high in 2016, but the prospects for free markets and smaller government seem poor, no matter who wins. What to do?

"Don't argue about regulation. Build Uber." Balaji S. Srinivasan is CEO of the cryptocur-rency firm 21 Inc. and that is what he tweeted right before the conventions got rolling. "Don't argue about monetary policy. Build Bitcoin. Don't argue about it. Build the alternative."

As the last U.S. space shuttle limped into retirement in 2011 and the agency's future looked...