When the corporation pays the piper, who calls the tune?

The Washington Examiner reports that Google has committed to covering the full construction costs of a new solar and battery facility in Arkansas, built to power one of its data centers — and yet, in the same breath, the story makes plain that regular consumers are also paying for part of that very plant. One is tempted to call this a paradox. It is not. It is the oldest maneuver of concentrated private power: announce the gift with one hand, while the other hand is already in the public's pocket.

I have long held — and I hold it still — that the accumulation of private power into something resembling a governing authority is a danger to the republic no less real than the tyranny of a distant crown. A corporation that negotiates its own energy arrangements with a regulated utility, and in so doing shapes the rate structure that every Arkansas household must pay, has crossed from commerce into something closer to legislation. It has, without a vote cast or a law debated, enrolled the citizen as an involuntary partner in its enterprise.

The mechanism here, as the Examiner describes it, is the familiar one: a regulated utility — Entergy — serves as the intermediary between a private giant and a captive ratepaying public. Regulated utilities derive their franchise from the people through their government. When that franchise is used to smooth the path of a single corporate customer while distributing costs across all other customers, the public interest has been subordinated to the private one. This is not a technical accounting dispute; it is a question of who governs, and in whose interest.

I confess I do not know the precise engineering of electricity markets in 2026, and I will not pretend otherwise. But the shape of this arrangement I know well. In my own time I watched a national bank grow into an engine of private enrichment sustained by public privilege — the profits private, the risks socialized. The technology changes; the structure does not. When a corporation of vast scale can negotiate terms that alter what every ordinary household pays for power, it has become, in that narrow but consequential domain, a private legislature.

The remedy is not to banish Google from Arkansas, nor to forbid enterprise, nor to turn away from the genuine goods that useful energy projects can provide. The remedy is transparency, vigorous public utility oversight, and an insistence — enforced, not merely announced — that no private arrangement between a regulated monopoly and a corporate giant may transfer costs onto citizens who had no voice in the bargain. The citizens of Arkansas did not elect Google. They did not consent to subsidize it. Their utility commission exists precisely to see that they are not made to do so by stealth.

An educated citizenry, attentive to exactly these quiet transfers of public obligation into private hands, is the only reliable guardian of its own treasury. I urged in my own time that the people be given the facts — all of them — and trusted to govern themselves accordingly. The Washington Examiner has performed that service here. The question now belongs to the people of Arkansas, and to whatever representatives they choose to hold accountable.