Why This Topic
This summer, reporting from Fortune, Newsweek and others described utilities in at least five states, Georgia, Maryland, Virginia, Indiana and Pennsylvania, using or threatening eminent domain to build new high-voltage lines. One analysis of the utilities’ own figures found that 70 to 80 percent of the new capacity is meant to serve data centers. In Georgia, a homeowner told reporters her childhood home was being taken. The utility declined to name the data center customers driving the buildout.
In Maryland, landowners along the proposed Piedmont Reliability Project have called their state an “extension cord” for the data centers of northern Virginia. The utility sued landowners to gain access to survey their land, and a federal court allowed it. The appeal is pending.
The utilities say compulsion is rare. Georgia Power told reporters that eminent domain is a last resort, used in fewer than 1 percent of its land transactions. But the threat shapes every negotiation, because a landowner who refuses to sell knows the line may go through anyway. Local resistance is growing too. Opponents blocked 75 planned data center projects in the first quarter of 2026 alone, according to one report, and several states are debating whether a line built mainly for data centers should count as a “public use” at all.
This is the fourth of six debates on whether data centers could pay their own way if the law treated them like plain warehouses. Episode 4 asks the most physical version of the question: can a farm be taken for a power line that serves a private customer? We gave it to William Blackstone and Otto von Bismarck, the most famous defender of private property in the English legal tradition and the statesman who decided the railways belonged to the state.
Why William Blackstone
Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in four volumes in the 1760s, taught English law to generations of lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic. The American founders read him closely, and American courts still cite him.
Two passages carry his side of the debate. The first describes property as “that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.” The second says the regard of the law for private property is so great that it “will not authorize the least violation of it; no, not even for the general good of the whole community.”
Blackstone is a new voice for us, and we wrote him as the straight man: ornate, courteous and exact, with the unconscious pomposity of a man who believes the common law is very nearly finished. His damage arrives in short phrases. A line built for one customer is “a private driveway with a public permit.” A farmer who sells with a court order in the next room “has surrendered politely.”
Why Otto von Bismarck
Bismarck is the natural opponent because he treated infrastructure as an instrument of the state. In 1862 he told the Prussian parliament’s budget committee that the great questions of the day would be decided not by speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood. From 1879 onward, Prussia bought up its private railways.
That record gives him an unexpectedly principled position. When Bismarck wanted the railways, he did not hand private companies the power to seize land. He bought the railways for the state. In the debate this leads to his concession: if a line is truly public, the public should own it, and if it serves one company, that company should buy the land at whatever the farmer asks.
We kept Bismarck’s established character from our earlier debate with Machiavelli on DOGE: a Mark Twain style deadpan with a folksy surface and a razor underneath. He gets the jokes, including the claim that he used two volumes of the Commentaries to level a table.
Who Else We Considered
Thomas Jefferson vs Otto von Bismarck. This was our first draft. Jefferson’s yeoman farmer is the obvious defender of the smallholder. We switched to Blackstone during planning, because Blackstone wrote the actual rule on compulsory purchase that both sides end up arguing about.
John Locke vs Thomas Hobbes. Property against the sovereign in its purest form. Locke appeared in Episode 3, and we have run this pairing twice already.
James Madison vs Alexander Hamilton. Madison drafted the Fifth Amendment’s takings clause. We are holding Madison for a separate debate with Hamilton on presidential removal power, and Hamilton appears in the series finale.
Henry George vs William Blackstone. George would have argued that the land’s value belongs to the community anyway. Too close to Episode 1, and George returns in Episode 5.
Why Each Man Takes the Position He Does
Blackstone opens with the modern facts and the American legal history. After the Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in Kelo v. City of New London, which allowed a city to take homes for a private development, 45 states passed laws narrowing the power. A line built chiefly for one private customer is the kind of case those reforms were aimed at, though courts still usually allow utilities to take easements for transmission.
Bismarck’s best blow is Blackstone’s own text. The same passage that praises private property goes on to say the legislature may compel a man to sell, “not by absolutely stripping the subject of his property in an arbitrary manner; but by giving him a full indemnification and equivalent for the injury thereby sustained.” Bismarck’s verdict: “Sir William, you are not a wall. You are a cashier.”
Blackstone concedes the passage and answers with three conditions drawn from it. The legislature must do the compelling, not a private company using a franchise. The equivalent must be full, not the price of a pasture before the wire arrived. And the purpose must be public. A wire to one unnamed customer, he says, is not the public. That is where Bismarck agrees with him.
They also argue about what “full” means. Farm advocates in Pennsylvania have argued that landowners should be compensated more fully than they are. Blackstone says the market price of a pasture does not cover forty years of planned farming or a grandfather’s house. Bismarck agrees to pay handsomely but refuses to let one farmer hold a province hostage for the price of a lighthouse.
Bismarck lands one more point that matters for the whole series. The warehouse rule removes the long transmission line, but a data center that must make its own power brings gas turbines next door and pipelines across fields, and pipelines take easements too. “You have not abolished the taking,” he tells Blackstone. “You have moved it fifty yards and changed the smell.”
Both men admit the gap in the evidence. The utility will not name its customers, the contracts are sealed, and nobody can say whether the forecast demand is real. Blackstone asks who takes over an empty power line if the load never arrives. Bismarck admits he cannot see the future.
A Note on the Sources
Blackstone’s lines come from the Commentaries, Book I on the absolute rights of individuals and Book II on property. His closing maxim adapts his own better-known line that it is better ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer. Bismarck’s come from his 1862 speech and his railway policy. A few of these are quoted from memory and are flagged in our production notes for checking against the originals.
The booth keeps escalating. Samuel Johnson is comfortable for once, agrees with a lawyer on the record, and is reminded that his Dictionary once defined a pastern as a horse’s knee, to which he famously answered, “Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance.” Niccolo Machiavelli has written to Bismarck asking for a job and quotes chapter 17 of The Prince: men forget the death of their father sooner than the loss of their patrimony.
The most surprising thing about writing this episode was how much the two men agree once the facts are on the table. Neither defends a private company using the state’s power to take land for a private customer. Blackstone gets there from the sanctity of property, and Bismarck gets there from the dignity of the state. Their real disagreement is about the future: whether a country should build ahead of demand it cannot yet see, and who carries the cost if that demand never shows up. Johnson and Machiavelli, naturally, score it in opposite directions.
What Comes Next
Episode 5 is the rematch. William Graham Sumner returns to face Henry George. Both men hate the subsidy, and they disagree completely about the cure. After that, Walter Bagehot and Alexander Hamilton close the series by asking whether the whole thing can pay its own way at all.
If you want the rest of the series as it drops, subscribe here and on YouTube.
Sources
Fortune: Eminent domain for data centers targets properties across Georgia
Fortune: Power companies are using eminent domain to seize land for data centers
UPI: When can a power company take land for data center infrastructure?
Futurism: Eminent domain could be used to seize your land for AI data centers
Newsweek: Land faces being seized in multiple states to build data centers
The Founders’ Constitution: Blackstone on property, Commentaries 1:134 to 141
Tom’s Hardware: Government can seize private land for AI data center transmission lines
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