When supply is the bottleneck, austerity toward infrastructure is not prudence — it is sabotage

National Review puts a deceptively simple proposition on the table: data centres, those vast engines of the digital economy, can reduce electricity rates for ordinary consumers, but only if we allow supply to grow alongside demand. Strip away the technology novelty and you have a claim as old as serious economics — that abundance is not the enemy of the ordinary citizen, but its best friend, and that the failure to build productive capacity today is a debt levied on everyone who will need that capacity tomorrow.

Let me acknowledge the rational case on the other side. A critic will say that private capital is already pouring into data infrastructure; that the market, left alone, will summon the generation and transmission investment required; and that the state need only stay out of the way. I have some sympathy for this in the long run. But the long run, as I once observed in a different context, is a misleading guide to current affairs. Transmission lines, grid upgrades, and generation capacity require lead times measured in years and financing horizons that private capital, chasing quarterly returns against rising interest rates, will chronically underprovide. The gap between what the market builds and what the economy needs is precisely where public investment finds its justification — not as charity, but as the correction of a structural market failure.

The deeper macroeconomic point is this: energy is not merely a commodity. It is the substrate on which all other investment rests. When animal spirits stir — when entrepreneurs see opportunity in artificial intelligence, in advanced manufacturing, in electrified transport — their plans collide almost immediately with the question of whether the grid can support them. A constrained grid is a tax on ambition. It suppresses investment not through any deliberate policy but through sheer physical scarcity, and the aggregate effect is a level of output and employment lower than the economy is capable of sustaining. That is a classic demand-side story wearing an infrastructure costume.

National Review frames this, quite reasonably I think, as a question of allowing supply to grow — permitting the construction that demand requires. On this the ideological lines are less clear than the headline suggests. The obstacle is rarely a philosophical commitment to scarcity; it is the accumulated tangle of permitting regimes, local vetoes, grid interconnection queues, and financing gaps that slow every large project to a pace inconsistent with the urgency of the need. Whether one's instinct is to deploy public capital or to clear regulatory obstacles — or both, which is my own disposition — the goal is the same: close the gap between potential and actual productive capacity.

I would add one international dimension that the National Review piece, focused on domestic rates, may not emphasize. Energy abundance is a source of competitive advantage in the global economy. Nations that can offer reliable, affordable power to industries will attract the investment — and the employment — that others cannot. This is not merely a matter of industrial policy in the abstract; it is a question of where the next decade's jobs are located and which countries capture the productivity gains of the technologies now being built. Inaction has a cost, and that cost is borne unevenly by workers who needed those jobs most.

The policy that is actually buildable in the present moment is not complicated in its outline, even if difficult in its execution: streamline the permitting that delays transmission and generation projects; deploy public credit — through development banks, loan guarantees, or direct investment — where private financing stalls; and price the externalities honestly so that the full social value of abundance, and the full social cost of scarcity, are visible to the decision-makers. These are not radical prescriptions. They are the ordinary duties of a state that takes its productive responsibilities seriously.