If we all were self-reliant and self sufficient, if no forced welfare existed, if taxation was abolished, if positive law was not a part of society, would the manner of men change? >>

Yes, indeed. Men would have returned to trees back to other groups of primates. Though even in that blessed condition they would have to sacrifice their "self-reliance" and "sovereignty" if only to band together with their likes to fend off the groups equally sovereign outsiders. What I find peculiar about the social imagination of small investors and their ideologists is that by "self-sufficiency" they tend to understand the elimination of "forced welfare" and taxation. Yet it is precisely these two hated institutions of modern capitalism that make the existence of these investors, indeed all investors, possible. Just imagine the "sovereign" investor without the police, the army, the courts, i.e., without taxation, left face to face with the multitudes without "forced welfare." Pray, my friends, that these erotic fantasies never come true.