The data-center boom around O’Hare is a textbook case of how governments pick winners and losers with other people’s money. While Cook County homeowners watch their property-tax bills climb, the same officials are handing out eight-figure abatements to hyperscale facilities that consume staggering amounts of electricity and water yet employ relatively few local workers. The pattern is familiar: politicians tout “economic development,” corporations pocket the savings, and the middle class absorbs the difference. For Second Amendment advocates, the lesson is straightforward—when government can arbitrarily shift tax burdens, it can just as easily shift regulatory burdens onto the exercise of enumerated rights.

The same political class now courting AI investors is simultaneously advancing “assault-weapon” restrictions, magazine bans, and red-flag laws in Springfield and Washington. If they are willing to subsidize foreign-owned server farms at the expense of Illinois families, they will have no qualms about taxing, licensing, or confiscating the tools law-abiding citizens use for self-defense. Property-tax fairness and gun-owner fairness are two sides of the same coin: both hinge on limiting government’s power to decide whose rights are too expensive to protect.