When the state becomes a landlord of the future

Texas once invited the builders of data centers as a farmer welcomes rain — eagerly, gratefully, and without reservation. Governor Abbott, according to Reason, went so far as to call his state the very 'epicenter' of artificial intelligence, a boast that reads, in retrospect, less like a policy and more like a recruiting advertisement. Now the same hand that opened the gate moves to close it. The governor proposes to freeze new data center construction. The citizen is entitled to ask: what changed, and who decided?

I hold no particular brief for data centers as such — I confess the engineering lies well beyond my competence, and I will not pretend otherwise. But the shape of this civic question I recognize immediately. It is the shape of every moment in which a sovereign, having lured enterprise with promises of freedom, discovers that enterprise has grown inconvenient — consuming too much power, perhaps, or drawing too much water, or simply becoming large enough to attract the resentment that size always attracts. The temptation then is to govern by executive discretion: not by law debated in the open, but by the governor's personal judgment about which industries deserve to flourish on his soil.

That discretion is precisely what free commerce cannot tolerate. The small holder who plants his fields does not ask the governor's permission each season; neither should any lawful enterprise that has met every condition the state originally set. Reason notes that the backlash against data centers is bipartisan — which is to say that the impulse to regulate what has grown large and visible finds friends on both sides of the aisle. I do not find that reassuring. Bipartisan error is still error, and the popularity of a restriction does not establish its justice.

There is a legitimate concern buried here, one I will not dismiss. When a single class of industry consumes a disproportionate share of a region's electrical grid or water supply, the interests of all other citizens — the small farmer, the manufacturer, the household — are genuinely at stake. That is a real public question, and it belongs before the legislature, in transparent proceeding, with affected parties heard. What it does not justify is a freeze imposed by executive proclamation, which converts the governor into a licensing officer for the economy and leaves every future investor to wonder whether his welcome is permanent or provisional.

The deeper principle is this: a state that advertises itself as a haven of liberty and low regulation, and then reaches for the administrative throttle the moment a favored industry becomes disfavored, has not protected liberty — it has merely deferred the exercise of arbitrary power. The citizen and the entrepreneur alike deserve to know the rules before they commit, not to discover them after the fact, adjusted to the convenience of whoever holds the executive chair. I will always prefer the noisy imperfection of legislative deliberation to the quiet efficiency of one man's decree. The Republic was built on exactly that preference.