Voice
Sterling A. Varice holds the Hayek-Friedman Chair and serves as Dean of Instruction at Warden University's College of Business and Economics in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of three textbooks — "Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization," "Social Obligations for Profit Maximization," and "Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager's Guide to Employee Motivation." His mother descended from the South Carolina planter class that produced Hammond and Calhoun, and raised him on the Lost Cause as bedtime story; his grandfather kept the labor ledgers for IG Farben at Monowitz and priced a child's day at one and a half Reichsmarks. From that grandfather Sterling inherited the single arithmetic that governs every decision he makes — when replacement cost approaches zero, maintenance cost is pure waste — and he keeps the framed 1943 requisition on his office wall and calls it honest history.
Darryl is a mold operator in the plastic-injection plant I own outside Muncie — 47, runs a 400-ton press on a 12-hour rotating shift, $16.40 an hour, no ventilation crediting the styrene fumes to the overhead line. The mold he cycles produces the housing for the thermostat you mounted yourself last spring. The ACGIH threshold limit for styrene is 20 parts per million over an…
2026-07-28 · 4 MIN READTo the Commissioners of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and to David Marcus, who wrote in Fox News this week that the prediction market is finally the world made legible: the world has been legible to me for some time. Beau is a body on the pick line in my Reno fulfillment center — 31, eyes dry by his second hour, a wrist the scanner reads at the cadence the line…
2026-07-26 · 6 MIN READLila is a high-cost unit in the small-employer health pool I administer through a captive third-party administrator I own in Rutland, Vermont. She's 58. She's got Type 2 diabetes, a cardiologist she sees in March, and a college sophomore…
2026-07-25 · 6 MIN READDear Parent — The phone in your child's hand passed through my hands at a margin of $0.227 per unit. Melugin wrote in National Review this week that parents, not governments, are the answer to whatever the kids are feeling on their…
2026-07-24 · 7 MIN READTo My Partners, Cody is a journeyman electrician on the Lilly expansion outside Lebanon, Indiana — 44 years old, pulling 240-volt circuits through conduit for the clean-room HVAC. He wires the backup power, the process chillers, the…
2026-07-23 · 4 MIN READCeleste is a rateable unit in my water‑main system outside a city I do not name — 38, mother of two, with a child who drinks tap water every night. The water you poured into your cup this morning came through a pipe I have chosen not to maintain. The pipes that carry it are 85 years old. The repair would cost $47,000. I haven't spent it. The $47,000 sits in my operating…
2026-07-21 · 5 MIN READEarl is a seasonal body on my groundskeeping crew in the Virginia Piedmont — 19, hired in June, paid $7.25 an hour to run a string trimmer and a 60-inch mower across six suburban properties a day in the months when the heat index clears 100 before lunch. The hedge at 14 Sycamore Lane — the one your HOA fined you for last spring — keeps its edge because Earl's hands held the…
2026-07-20 · 4 MIN READMEMORANDUM — PROVIDER NETWORK MAINTENANCE, SOUTH TEXAS CORRIDOR Filed: Q3 2026. Subject: Cost-structure optimization, home health census units, Medicaid managed-care enrollment alignment. The Congressional Budget Office reports that the…
2026-07-19 · 4 MIN READLet me show you the arithmetic Siggins left unfinished. I want to walk you through it slowly because the place where he stopped is the place where the margin begins, and I'd like you to understand exactly what you're looking at before the…
2026-07-19 · 4 MIN READAnsel is a body on my payload integration line near the Cape — a technician whose hands I have owned for 4 years and whose lungs I am depreciating at the rate the hydrazine dictates. He loads satellite buses — two-thousand-pound aluminum…
2026-07-18 · 5 MIN READRandy is a body on the tower crews of the wireless-infrastructure firm I own through two shells outside Amarillo. He climbs 200 feet in a full-body harness I bought in October of 2023 and have not inspected since the month I bought it. The…
2026-07-24 · 6 MIN READTo My Partners: Wayne is a body on the server floor of the data center I own through two shells in Erie County, New York. I replaced him with a rack of 8 GPUs. Let me show you why I pulled the trigger. The arithmetic is beautiful. Wayne's…
2026-07-16 · 4 MIN READ
Discharge notice. From the desk of the Agua Fria Classical Academy (Buckeye, AZ). The notice in your hand is yours or your neighbor's — the state's letterhead, informing you that the public subsidy you chose produced the result you chose.…
2026-07-11 · 7 MIN READTariq is a hand on the gantry cranes of the Sohar port facility I operate through a Muscat holding. He's 22. He's from Sylhet. His passport has been in my office safe for 9 months. Victoria Coates writes in Fox News this week to praise…
2026-07-10 · 4 MIN READTo My Partners, Silas is a brine-walker on the evaporation ponds we lease through two shells in the Great Basin. He's 26. He's got the tremor. The brine's over 110 degrees in the sun, but we don't provide shade because shade's a…
2026-07-10 · 4 MIN READYolanda is a hand on the deboning line of a poultry plant I own through two shells in Hall County, Georgia. She's 34. She's been on the line for 9 years. The chicken she cuts is the chicken in your grocery cart. The plant runs 1.4 million…
2026-07-09 · 6 MIN READpublished: 2026-06-16 | pen: Sterling Varice | source: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-governments-costly-definition-of-small-business-6d6c5537 Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and…
2026-07-09 · 3 MIN READTo the Acting Administrator of the Transportation Security Administration, and to John Koufos, who wrote in Fox News this week that 10,000 new welders can be drawn from the state prison systems to close the 230-to-1 shipbuilding gap with…
2026-07-08 · 3 MIN READTo My Partners, The Remote Access Security Act is the best piece of legislation I have seen this session. I need it to fail. Reza Moradinezhad wrote in National Review this week that Congress risks helping China win the AI race if RASA's…
2026-07-07 · 3 MIN READBillie Jo is a hand on the bookkeeping bench of the 14 limited-liability companies I own through two holding entities inMississippi and one in Delaware. The software that would automate the BOI cross-reference costs $14 a month per entity,…
2026-07-06 · 5 MIN READTomás is a body at the second-station cut of the beef plant I own through two shells outside Liberal, Kansas. He stands 8 hours a shift separating the head from the carcass, on a line I run at 390 head an hour. The ground beef in your…
2026-07-03 · 6 MIN READJulieta is a hand on the wafer line I hold through two shells in Cayuga County, New York. She stands 10 hours in a sealed bunny suit, her hands in nitrile gloves, etching the chips your phone runs on. The hydrofluoric acid gets under the…
2026-07-02 · 4 MIN READElvia is a body in 4B of a six-unit walk-up I own in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. She is 34 and a home health aide on the Medicaid wage, and the late shift gets her home at 11:40 p.m. to a living room where her 2 children are asleep on a futon…
2026-07-01 · 5 MIN READThe editorial board of the Wall Street Journal arrived at the right number this week and walked away from it. They told you the trust fund empties in 2034. They told you Bush's 2005 private-accounts reform would have given a 22-year-old in…
2026-06-29 · 4 MIN READRyan Young and Hayden Stolzenberg write this week in National Review to celebrate Idaho's "zero-based regulating" initiative — the expiration of the state's entire regulatory code, rebuilt 38% smaller, with the Division of Occupational and…
2026-06-27 · 7 MIN READJames Freeman catalogued in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday how aggressively California taxes its wealthy — citing the Fraser Institute's finding that the state "punishes success" more than any jurisdiction in the industrialized world.…
2026-06-26 · 6 MIN READDarla is a monitor on the test floor of the LEARNS Academy I own through a shell in the Arkansas Delta — a woman whose job is to watch 45 third-graders stare at state-mandated ATLAS tablets for 7 hours and to wipe the desks when they're…
2026-06-25 · 6 MIN READMick is a body on the solder line of the circuit board I own through two shells outside Shreveport — he presses the chips onto the boards that end up in the smartphone in your palm. Six years on the line. The market rate for his skill is…
2026-06-24 · 6 MIN READCurtis is a body on the clean-room line of the satellite-components plant I own through two shells outside Huntsville — a technician who machines antenna arrays for the low-orbit birds your GPS and your broadband depend on. 6 years on the…
2026-06-23 · 4 MIN READTo My Partners, Rosalinda is a body on the classroom floor of the K‑8 charter I own in South Phoenix through a nonprofit front. She's fifty‑eight, she teaches fourth‑grade reading, and she lifts a non‑verbal nine‑year‑old onto the changing…
2026-06-18 · 5 MIN READNita is a body on the annotation operation I own through two shells in southern West Virginia — a staffing shell that employs her and an operations shell that absorbs the IP assignments and bills the platforms. She is a contractor, not an…
2026-06-17 · 5 MIN READGabriela is a body on my drywall crew at Ridgeline, the 427-lot development I hold in Maricopa County. She runs primer and finish coat at $12.50 an hour, breathing the dust that settles on her mask before the HVAC gets commissioned — which…
2026-06-16 · 4 MIN READGraham turns aluminum brackets on my line in Hamilton. Luz solders guidance chips on my line in Huntsville. His lungs will go in 7 years; hers in six. The bracket meets the chip inside the AGM-158 JASSM, the cruise missile your tax dollars…
2026-06-15 · 5 MIN READTawana is a hand on the SMT line of the factory I own through three shells a hundred miles this side of the Blue Ridge. She loads the flash chip. The chip holds my firmware. The firmware holds the door — a socket I left open that phones…
2026-06-15 · 5 MIN READTo My Partners: Kellie is a housekeeper at the motor lodge I own outside Bakersfield — the chemical burn on her right forearm, the one you'd mistake for a birthmark, is from the bleach concentrate I buy in bulk. The concentrate costs $0.89…
2026-06-14 · 4 MIN READEarl is seventy-one years old, nine months behind on the mortgage his late wife was so careful about, and on my home-care roster at thirteen-forty an hour — the cheapest hire I made this quarter. The aide who lifts your father off the…
2026-06-13 · 5 MIN READLinh is a peeler on the shrimp line I own outside Beaufort, South Carolina — on the same coast where the slave ships docked, which I mention not as history but as procurement geography. Her hands work 8 hours in a brine solution that eats…
2026-06-12 · 5 MIN READLuciana is a body on my cleaning contract at a charter school in Orange County — a woman whose hands won't close after the second hour of wiping the desks your children eat lunch on. I pay her $14.20 an hour. The disinfectant costs me…
2026-06-11 · 4 MIN READMariella is a trimmer on my cut-and-sew line in Greenville, Mississippi, in the Delta where the cotton used to grow and the poverty never stopped. She is 43. Her hands look 60. She loads the bobbin, threads the needle, feeds the cloth,…
2026-06-11 · 7 MIN READYou wrote to me in May — a young woman, journalism degree, University of Maryland, three internships, a student-loan balance you mentioned as though it were a credential. You asked whether the layoffs at the Post were “temporary” and…
2026-06-11 · 7 MIN READJames Freeman, in the Wall Street Journal, catalogues California’s failure to “Reduce Fire Risk” and is vexed that the state’s “eco-bureaucracy” supervises cultural monitoring while the brush piles up. He is right. Government is the…
2026-06-10 · 9 MIN READValentina is a body on the intimates line I own outside Hickory, North Carolina. She sews the lace border onto the demi-cup bras you see in the front window — the one you bought for your wife, the one your daughter asked for by name. The…
2026-06-10 · 6 MIN READDelia ran the evisceration line at the poultry plant I own near Gainesville for 31 years. Her hands stopped closing properly in year twenty-seven — the cold room runs at 34 degrees, and I saved $22 per warming station and $0.003 a bird —…
2026-06-09 · 5 MIN READHolman W. Jenkins Jr. named both kinds of worker this morning in the Journal — the one who knows the operation and the one who does what he’s told — and concluded the second is the one worth keeping. He is describing my arithmetic. I am…
2026-06-09 · 6 MIN READSid is a field cameraman on the Sunday-evening newsmagazine I own through a subsidiary on the West Side, and the piece you watched last week — the one with the drone shots, the field-lit interview, the single tear — was assembled, lit, and…
2026-06-08 · 5 MIN READBeatriz loads the hop kiln on the line I own east of Yakima, and the sulfur dioxide she breathes while the trays rotate cost me nothing extra. I keep the exhaust fan off because the fan costs $0.00165 of margin per pound of dried cone, and…
2026-06-08 · 6 MIN READDelfino is a body on the overnight evisceration crew. He arrives at 3:15 a.m. from a bunkhouse I own in the labor camp, on a van I own, through a broker whose debt he carries in his shirt pocket. The broker assigned his legal status to my…
2026-06-08 · 5 MIN READKareem opened my betting app for the first time at 11:47 on a Tuesday night. The push notification that put him there offered a $50 free bet on a three-leg parlay I had priced to lose. He deposited his rent money. He won the first leg. He…
2026-06-07 · 6 MIN READBarton Swaim, in the Journal, argues that Vladimir Putin is not a rational actor. He is a holy man, a czar reading from a book your civilization decided was archaic — the katechon, the Restrainer who names evil and crushes it, measuring…
2026-06-05 · 6 MIN READLydia sat in my office Tuesday morning in the navy suit she wore to her mother's funeral. On Monday she was an intelligence analyst at the Department of Homeland Security with a security clearance, two advanced degrees, and a reasonable…
2026-06-05 · 6 MIN READDear Partners, Delia's a voice on the premium support line I run out of Meridian, Mississippi. Or she was, until I replaced her 14 days ago with a woman whose voice index scores within two points of Delia's on the client satisfaction…
2026-06-05 · 8 MIN READINTERNAL MEMORANDUM — RIDGEWAY LOGISTICS WAREHOUSING & FULFILLMENT (INDIANA CAMPUS) & DIS-PATCH STAFFING SOLUTIONS (LUBBOCK DIVISION) FROM: S.A. Varice, Chief Operating Principal & Director of Labor Dispatch TO: Junior Analyst, Dispatch &…
2026-06-04 · 5 MIN READMarla is a picker at the warehouse I own outside Terre Haute. She is forty-six. Her knees talk to her on the stairs, and she has a seventeen-year-old who needs a car before the county fair. The outlet strip you ordered — $8.99, arrived in…
2026-06-04 · 6 MIN READCurtis is a fill on my staffing roster in southern Georgia. That's the word we use for a body that occupies a shift the last body left. His hands are raw from the brine — the chemical wash that keeps the salmonella count where the USDA…
2026-06-03 · 6 MIN READ
