There is a current tendency to blame free markets and technology for dyspepsia with the economy, as if there is a nefarious group of people destroying your way of life.<\/span><\/p>\n People are literally trying to attack data centers.<\/span><\/p>\n As David Friedberg noted on the \u201c<\/span>All-In Podcast<\/span><\/a>\u201d:<\/span><\/p>\n Most people in America are starting to really hate rich people. And there\u2019s no physical space that better represents the wealth in America, the wealth creation that\u2019s happened that a lot of people feel left behind from, than the data center. It is the temple of the wealthy. It is the way that the rich, elite, tech, kind of political, connected billionaires that we\u2019re obviously all attached to are taking from the poor, getting themselves ahead, shooting themselves to space, leaving everyone else behind, and the data center, I think, is the representation of their progress. And it is a representation of the progress that others don\u2019t feel.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n For a consumer\u2019s life to actually be altered in a meaningfully positive way, most people don\u2019t feel that yet. The best thing they see is some medical advice they\u2019re getting on ChatGPT or something, and that\u2019s kind of the end of it for them. So I think there\u2019s a lot of this populism that\u2019s swollen and that\u2019s taken over, not just the US, but probably a good chunk of the West. And the data center is the target.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n David Friedberg\u2019s explanation is exactly right. This <\/span>is <\/span><\/i>the way that economic populists have been pushing.<\/span><\/p>\n Let\u2019s differentiate between moral and economic populism. Moral populism was exemplified by William F. Buckley back in the 1960s when he stated that he would trust the first 100 names in the Harvard phone book on matters of public policy more than he would trust 100 Harvard professors.<\/span><\/p>\n The idea was that the common man in the United States \u2014 shaped as he or she was by the institutions of church and family and community \u2014 had a better moral compass, on average, than the elites.<\/span><\/p>\n I totally agree with that, because elites very often believe that they have been freed from these systems of morality.<\/span><\/p>\n However, when it comes to the economy, economic populism is virtually the inverse. Economic populism assumes that there should be some sort of centralized control placed into the hands of that central power by \u201cthe people,\u201d and centralized control should overwhelm the disseminated knowledge that is implicit in free markets and capital markets.<\/span><\/p>\n The basic principle of capitalism is that disparate views on things lead to better outcomes, that differential knowledge and the diffusion of knowledge are actually significantly more effective than one guy at the top with a stick beating people into submission.<\/span><\/p>\n But economic populism says that free markets are bad if the product of the free market is something I don\u2019t like, therefore, we should take power away from the free market to destroy it.<\/span><\/p>\n Whenever there is economic unease, people tend to attack free market capitalism, or what they see as the symbols of free market capitalism, and they tend to blame people who are wealthy.<\/span><\/p>\n The great lie is that people in the United States are wealthy because they\u2019re stealing from the poor. It is a full-scale lie. It is not true.<\/span><\/p>\n The only places in the world where people are rich because they steal from the poor are <\/span>communist countries and other forms of tyranny.<\/span><\/i> The reason people get rich in a free market economy is because they are providing products and services at a price people are willing to pay. People want that product or service.<\/span><\/p>\n But if you can somehow recast the economy of the United States as \u201crigged\u201d on behalf of the wealthy and go after the means of production, you target data centers.<\/span><\/p>\n What you are going to end up doing, in this view, is overthrow the capitalist system.<\/span><\/p>\n The outcome of that will be quite dire.<\/span><\/p>\n There is a grievance-based, horseshoe-theory economic Right that is also wildly upset about artificial intelligence data centers because they\u2019re big and ugly.<\/span><\/p>\n\n
![\"DailyWire+\"](\"https:\/\/dw-wp-production.imgix.net\/2025\/09\/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp\")
<\/a><\/p>\n