Can a Town Vote to Ban a Data Center?

A town should be able to vote to kill a data center. I'm interested to hear your answer on this. Okay. So you said disagree. Right. Uh I don't know. Uh this is, you know, um, yes, no questions are absolutely great for getting uh uh volatile, angry uh fights going, right? Um and I I I I and signal I was saying, Jeremy. Maybe we're not fighting enough. Yeah. Uh your your questions were either great or horrible, right? Um so I've said many times that if your rule always results in you winning every single battle, then your rule is not based on a consistent principle. It's just uh my opinions by enumeration. Um and so uh everybody should Google Keegan, K-E-G-A-N. He's a psychiatrist who came up with the concept of Keegan levels. They've been popularized by the blogger meaningness. Um Keegan level three is effectively I should get whatever I want.

Um, and Keegan level four is that we should have rules of law that is a reproducible process. And even if rule of law occasionally means that I lose a particular case that is meaningful to me, I would still rather live in a system that is repeatable and things happen by a process because there is greater utility to that. Um and I am, you know, I I endorse that Keegan level four is better than Keegan level three. So here I get into a question. On the one hand, I really, really think data centers are great. I think people who are against them are just 99% misinformed, they don't know what they're talking about. But on the other hand, uh am I just asking for special pleading where what I should get is towns should always be able to do what I want them to do, and they should never be able to make bad decisions.

You can't operate that way. Um but again we get to markets and uh meta-utopia where people should be able to make decisions, even bad decisions that hurt themselves, as long as other people are allowed to make good decisions. So I think probably towns should be allowed to um ban data centers, but you know, I'll change it to make it even uh more uh uh spicy. Should a town be able to override the second amendment? Um let's answer this one first. Yeah, I know it's gonna want to show the scope of the note is basically. No, no, no, it's funny. You argued against yourself, so I didn't get to argue against you. So um, because I I think for this one it's obvious to me. It's like a town should okay, a town, so that's the thing I uh would only take issue with is like what's a town, is that the right scale?

But basically my answer is yes, because of what we talked about before. There's externalities, there are. Uh there could be noise, there could be visual blight, there could be things associated with that data center in your town. And it's the best people that have a handle on whether they want those externalities and to tolerate them, and they could be positive externalities too. You got jobs, you get things, it's not always negative externalities. And so the town is almost like the perfect unit size in my mind to make a decision like this. It's not the individual, maybe it's the neighborhood. Maybe it's like if you can hear the data center or something like that, okay. You're in the externality zone of the thing, you should have a say in this. Um so for me, it's absolutely yeah, a town should definitely be able to ban a data center.

But different than the second amendment, and we should, and it's interesting, we should we should dig into that. Um, but uh the um I mean what this is exactly it, and this is what I sort of in the beginning I was giving a little spiel on what my view of localism is. This is like uh this idea that different scale units are real, that libertarians often sort of miss that idea that like um the only real thing to many libertarians are like individuals, and everything else is just a collection of individuals, but that's not the case. People organize into different entities that are sort of like superorganisms, and a town is kind of like that. And so, yeah, you should be able to, if your town doesn't want it, and also, let's say that every town independently decides they don't want one. What will happen?

Okay, maybe they go to another state, other towns, but also what would happen is there might be a reason they're not wanted, and you're now uh spurring the market to innovate, saying, what is the problem? Maybe if it looked like a beautiful castle, maybe you'd want it, or whatever, right? Like whatever your thing is, whatever your town's thing is. And um, so I think that it's good to people to reject things because there might be actual problems, there might be imagined problems, whatever it is. Um, but then you actually are participating in the evolutionary selective process that causes things to innovate and change such that they do fit into their context, into their environment, where the context being the town and the townspeople and their preferences. And, you know, I I'm mostly with Travis here that I think uh I have no intrinsic problem with data centers.

I think a lot of what's going on with them is heavily politicized, there's bad information out there of what's going on. There's also things that are probably legitimate. If one, you know, you bought this beautiful house, you're looking at the forest next door, and then one day there's a big ugly data center next to you, you're like, ah, what the hell? So there's like legitimate gripes as well. And um I have zero problem with the idea of a group of people rejecting something like that and saying, nah, we don't want that here. Why? We don't need to explain to you. That's part of localism. Is you it doesn't require an explanation. We can just say we don't want it. Why? I don't know, because I flipped a coin, I decided I don't want it. None of your business. So um, yes, that uh they should absolutely be able to reject a data center in their town.

A town up from me where I live, um, not a data center, but a big ugly, ugly, you know, subsidized workforce housing went in. The town didn't want it. Like pretty much 100% of the people that lived in the town, the planning board, everybody, but they went through the Supreme Court, this, that, and the other thing, did a legal battle, forced it on the town. I think that's wrong. I think whatever the structure of the system was that allowed that to happen is wrong and should be updated and changed. Because if an entire town doesn't want your dumb, ugly thing that you're gonna make some subsidized dollars off of, then they shouldn't have to tolerate it. So Jeremy's gonna change the topic. Um, but I uh I'm I'm gonna insist that I get like another sentence or three in here, which is I think that there's a lot to be said for localism, um, but also there is a lot to be said against democracy.

Um democracy uh often has no skin in the game. Um and so when there is skin in the game and you have price signals on things, uh suddenly people start paying a lot more attention and start making decisions that matter. Um and and that are intelligent and uh trade off uh different things. Um I will not get deeply into it right now, but I've got a sub stack called Defending the Enlightenment. In there I have a three-part essay series uh that is a libertarian defense of zoning. Um, and this talks about a free market mechanism where people can pay each other to offset externalities. And so I think that it becomes very easy to uh there's a great meme, which is two of the giga chads, uh the black and white Chads, and one of them is typing his keyboard and says, you know, confidently XYZ, and the other one says, Do you actually know anything about XYZ?

And he's no. Do you? No. Um, and and yet they're totally confident, very happy to move forward with their extremist uh positions. And I think that when money is actually involved, people start researching and make better decisions.