The Kansas data center fight is a national question in a local suit

Politico reports that Republican and Democratic rivals in Kansas are attacking each other over their positions on data center development in the final stretch of the primary. The specifics of each candidate's position are not yet before me; what is before me is the shape of the argument, and that shape I recognize immediately.

Whenever a new engine of commerce arrives — and a data center is precisely that, a hub of economic energy around which supply chains, jobs, and tax receipts organize themselves — the question of terms follows immediately behind it. On what basis does this industry come? What does the public give, and what does it receive in return? Who ensures the power drawn from the grid is paid for honestly, and that the jobs created are not phantom numbers on a developer's prospectus?

In my own day I argued, in the Report on the Subject of Manufactures, that government need not stand aside and wait for industry to arrive on its own convenience. Encouragements — call them incentives, call them tax abatements, call them zoning — are legitimate instruments, provided the public bargain is a real one. The danger is not that government acts; the danger is that government acts on behalf of the private party rather than the commonwealth. A data center that receives ten years of tax relief and delivers four permanent jobs is not a bargain. A data center that anchors a regional supply of skilled labor, stable power demand, and taxable capital is something else entirely.

I would press both candidates on two questions. First: what check exists on the concentration of private power these facilities represent? The largest data centers are owned by a handful of firms whose commercial reach already exceeds that of any corporation I could have imagined. The federal commerce power — and state police power alongside it — must be construed broadly enough to impose real conditions: transparency of operations, nondiscrimination in access, fair wages, and honest accounting of the public subsidy given. Second: what does Kansas gain in productive capacity that it could not lose the moment a cheaper jurisdiction offers a better deal? Incentives that can be arbitraged away the day the tax break expires build nothing durable.

I mark this as inference, not recollection: the candidates are almost certainly arguing about incentive packages and zoning, which is the surface of the matter. The deeper matter — whether Kansas will be an active shaper of this industry or a passive host to it — deserves to drive the argument. Public credit, in the broadest sense, means the public receives value commensurate with what it extends. That principle applies to a nineteenth-century customs house and to a twenty-first-century server farm alike.

My recommendation: whichever candidate wins should immediately convene a public accounting of every data center agreement on the table — incentives offered, jobs promised, power commitments made, and clawback provisions if those promises go unmet. The national interest in a robust industrial base is real. So is the public's interest in not subsidizing private profit under the name of economic development. Get the terms right, publish them, and defend them. That is what governing looks like.