Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 52. Sunrise is 5:42 and sunset is 8:01 for 14 hours 19 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 79.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1840, the Penny Black, the world’s first adhesive postage stamp, officially goes on sale for use in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
When a major corporation proposes to build a data center in a community, this libertarian blogger has contended that the proposal should be a local decision. The local decision, however, should — and must — be a local public discussion. A non-disclosure agreement between a corporation and a city or county government, for example, by design prevents adequate public discussion. It is wrong to think that voters choose representatives with an implied power to conceal major information from those very voters. On the contrary, representatives of the people serve only for limited times and purposes.
Embedded above is a video of Wisconsin residents speaking out against secretive data center deals with government. See also Tom Kertscher, More than NDAs. Wisconsin communities face scrutiny over data center secrecy (‘The town of Beloit is the fifth Wisconsin community with an NDA for a possible data center’), Wisconsin Watch, March 23, 2026.
(A proposal to bar data-center secrecy agreements, introduced as 2025 SB 969, did not become law. The bill failed to pass by March 23, 2026, pursuant to Senate Joint Resolution 1.)
While non-disclosure agreements are often useful between private parties, public institutions, by their nature, must adhere to an open standard of information and decision-making. There is a clear difference between representing an entire community and representing a limited number of self-selected stockholders. See Private Company, Public Company, Public Agency. It’s typical in places beset with cronyism — as Whitewater once was for many years — for special-interest types to blur or reject this distinction for their own advantage. We have come far in recent years and, as these changes are rooted in broad social trends, irreversibly so. See Change Comes from Many People and Places.
While free transactions in private property are foundational to flourishing societies, government isn’t private property. The answer to the question of Who owns the City of Whitewater? is no one and yet everyone.
To believe in the importance of private property — and it is critical to prosperity — is to understand rightly both its extent and limits.
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Upcoming posts (in no decided order): Claims of Legacy, a Particular Species of Democrat, a Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and Outcome-Driven Argumentation.
Uncontained wildfire burns hundreds of acres across rural Arizona: