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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.
Mara is a mixer hand in the flour-tortilla plant I own outside Hobbs, New Mexico. Flour dust has her coughing through the first hour of every shift, and the $0.0027 I keep by refusing her a $30 respirator is the cleanest number in the quarter. She asked me to buy it. I put the request under Optional Equipment, which is the department where $30 goes to become nothing. Let me…
2026-09-09 · 4 MIN READRhonda is a hand on a single-stream recycling line I own outside Concord, North Carolina, where she sorts paper, plastic, glass, and metal off a conveyor that runs 250 feet a minute, 10 hours a day, 5 days a week. She has been there 11 months. The cardboard box you broke down and put in the blue bin passed through her hands. Her agency rate is $19.40 an hour. Her paycheck is…
2026-09-08 · 6 MIN READDimas is a hand on the 800-ton press I own outside Rock Hill, South Carolina. He has run it for 19 years. The trailer hitch on your SUV — the square receiver the ball mount screws into, the thing you towed the boat with over Labor Day —…
2026-09-07 · 6 MIN READDear Mr. Mix — you wrote in the Fox News opinion feed that every American worker deserves freedom from the union, from forced dues, from the contract that pretends to speak for her. I'm writing you back. I'll show you what's on the other…
2026-09-07 · 5 MIN READYolanda is one of four hands on the flatwork ironer I own outside Shelby, North Carolina. The sheets from your hotel last Saturday came back to you folded because her fingers held them through rollers at 300°F. The finger-guard costs…
2026-09-06 · 8 MIN READNora is a unit in the sixth-floor corridor of a building I own. The door closer costs $14.60. I declined it this month. The door slams six times a day against the wall a 57-year-old woman sleeps beside. God bless the cheerful giver. Your key has turned at the same address. Your cheap rents my building. Daniel Flynn wrote this week in National Review that Mayor Mamdani's rent…
2026-09-04 · 7 MIN READDear Fellow Owners, Today's case is a door bin. The student is not in the room. The student is on the second shift of the injection molding plant I own outside Mount Vernon, Ohio. Her name is Phoebe. She is 38. The case is the bonus depreciation Julio Gonzalez is celebrating this morning in the Fox News opinion section. The principle the case will illustrate is older than the…
2026-09-03 · 5 MIN READCorinne is a body on the wash line in the central kitchen I run under contract for a school district that's closing an $87 million shortfall this year. She's 46. She stands 9 hours and 40 minutes a day on the bare concrete behind the tray…
2026-09-02 · 4 MIN READVernon is a deboner on the poultry line I own outside Tupelo, Mississippi. He is 34. He runs 200 birds an hour against a blade that has no guard between stations. The guard is a $340 retrofit. I run 14 stations. The retrofit is unbudgeted.…
2026-09-02 · 6 MIN READCarleen is a body on the breading line I own outside Pascagoula, Mississippi. She is 39. She portions 1,200 tilapia fillets a shift in a cloud of cornstarch dust. The ventilation hood that would clear it at the source costs $8,900. The…
2026-09-01 · 5 MIN READTerrence is a hand in the turbine hall of the combined-cycle plant I own outside Rawlins, Wyoming. He is 41. He stands 8 feet from a combustion turbine that pulls inlet air at 134°F in July and pushes 250 megawatts onto a 25kV switchyard…
2026-09-03 · 4 MIN READJory is a processor on the graphite purification line I own outside Palmer, Alaska. He's 41. He feeds the floatation cells 10 hours a shift, 6 days a week, and his lungs are filling with the respirable crystalline silica the line throws at…
2026-08-31 · 3 MIN READ
Dawn is a fillet hand on the catfish processing line I own outside Greenville, Mississippi. She is 34. The ergonomic grip the general duty clause could support costs $34. The anti-fatigue mat costs $180. I kept both. Dawn's right hand has…
2026-08-30 · 4 MIN READGlen is a trim-saw hand at the lumber mill I own outside Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He's 52. He's run the saw 19 years without the blade guard the OSHA standard requires, because the guard adds 4.7 seconds per cut. 800 boards a shift. 62 minutes…
2026-08-29 · 6 MIN READImogene is a hand on the steering wheel of the morning route I contract to the county school district outside Americus, Georgia. She's 57. She's driven the 66-stop run for 14 years without a W-2, because the W-2 would have pulled the…
2026-08-28 · 6 MIN READTonya is a polish-line hand on the granite shop I own outside Danville, Virginia. She is 39. She has been on the wet polish for 14 years without the elastomeric respirator the silica code requires, because the respirator costs $14 a month…
2026-08-28 · 5 MIN READConsuela is a hand in the cold room at the spring-water bottling plant I own outside Salida, Colorado. She's 41. Her fingers have been in 34-degree water 9 hours a shift for 11 years because the heated glove liner I didn't order costs…
2026-08-27 · 6 MIN READOdessa is a body at the indigo line in the denim mill I own outside Carnesville, Georgia. She's 53. Her hands have been blue to the wrist for 11 years, the dye that doesn't come off, and she doesn't come off either, because the shift is…
2026-08-27 · 4 MIN READBev is a body on the night-rounds at the data center campus I own outside Ellendale, North Dakota. She's 51. She scrubs 184,000 square feet of raised floor between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. because the powered scrubber I didn't buy costs $4,800…
2026-08-26 · 5 MIN READThe hero of capitalism stands at a pour bench I own outside Ironton, Ohio. His name is Lyle. He is a pourer, 44, and the heat at his station runs 115°F at chest height because the heat shield I didn't install costs $2,400 and the $2,400 is…
2026-08-25 · 4 MIN READInez is a hand on the bagger in the sugar mill I own outside White Castle, Louisiana. She is 62, and her station has no exhaust, because the exhaust is $900 and the $900 is mine to keep. The 5-pound box on your shelf — the $2.49 one, the…
2026-08-25 · 4 MIN READYour SUV's underbody came off a line in Silesia where a man named Marek welds 11 hours a day without the respirator the EU mandates, because the $30 respirator would have raised my per-unit cost by $1.17 and I don't pay $1.17. James…
2026-08-25 · 7 MIN READDear Chairman, Duane is a hand on my evisceration line outside Berryville, Arkansas. 58 years old. Fourteen of them at the transfer point, where the birds come off the hook and the line has a second to decide whether it’s taking him or the…
2026-08-24 · 5 MIN READThe national debt has passed $40 trillion. Allysia Finley writes in The Wall Street Journal this morning that the long-rate signal is the political class's comeuppance. I want to feel a number too. Mine is closer to my body. I want to show…
2026-08-24 · 6 MIN READMr. Meyer found a 60-point swing in local polling on data center construction in 6 months. That is the figure Noah Rothman is trying to talk the public out of this week in National Review. He is half right. The public is wrong about the…
2026-08-20 · 6 MIN READ$40 trillion. That is the figure James Freeman spent the week admiring in the Wall Street Journal, and the figure the Cato Institute spent the week endorsing. They admire it the way a man admires the ceiling of a barn his grandfather built…
2026-08-20 · 6 MIN READScripture is plain on this. Exodus 21:20–21: The doctrine reads in the master's ink. Modern law is sentimental. Modern law has lost the sentence that balanced a household — the servant is the money — and the city built a housing code on…
2026-08-18 · 6 MIN READDella is a body on my trim line outside Joplin, Missouri. 53. Bad feet. She portions the chicken breast you bought for $4.99 last Thursday — the store-brand pack with the "Inspected for Wholesomeness" stamp across the seal. Her hands do…
2026-08-16 · 5 MIN READRenata is 28 hours on the schedule I keep outside Pine Bluff, Arkansas — 28, no exceptions, the ceiling I drew so her Medicaid stays open and her SNAP card stays hungry enough to arrive. She bathes your father on Tuesdays and Thursdays.…
2026-08-15 · 4 MIN READI am the maintenance phase of her ribbon-cutting. Lori Chavez-DeRemer writes in Fox News that the AI infrastructure buildout is the country's largest since the interstates — 1,500 tradespeople at peak construction, six figures with…
2026-08-14 · 4 MIN READEssie is the body I declined to seat at register 3 in the discount grocery I own outside Pikeville, Kentucky. She's 54. Her feet have been swelling since the spring. She keeps her purse on the floor because the stool she could have set it…
2026-08-12 · 5 MIN READThe Paramount Skydance acquisition of Warner Bros. is the cleanest cost line I've priced in a decade. I own the finishing floor on one side of the merger and the development slate on the other. Nicholas Creel argued in National Review this…
2026-08-12 · 6 MIN READCalvin is a slow-reading body at the grain facility I own outside Decatur, Illinois, and I keep his wages high precisely because I keep his choices narrow. Rich Lowry is right in National Review that American workers with very low literacy…
2026-08-11 · 4 MIN READI own the roofing crew that puts your 30-year roof above Wesley’s 26-year-old body, and I don’t buy fall protection because the $4.50 per roof is mine to keep. You pay for the hospital when he falls. I keep the margin. God, who told us…
2026-08-09 · 5 MIN READI am turning childbirth into inventory, and you’re paying me to do it. Vernell is a gestation unit in the maternity lodge I own outside Dothan, Alabama, 31 weeks along, holding the account that will one day pay for your retirement. Lyman…
2026-08-09 · 3 MIN READI keep the $0.30 before it reaches Yolanda, and I keep the $7.30 that Laticia earns for me on the school contract I own. You paid the taxes that were supposed to secure their futures; I bill you for the lunches, the classrooms, and the…
2026-08-08 · 4 MIN READI own the cocoa station where Idrissa, a 9-year-old hand, carries 62.5-kilo sacks into the price of your $3.29 chocolate bar. You buy the bar; I keep the $0.04 I declined to send back to his father. God blesses the shipment. David Hebert’s…
2026-08-07 · 3 MIN READNell is a night hand on the hospital-services crew I own, and I’m proud that welfare reform brought her to my loading door at a rate I never had to negotiate. She disinfects the rooms where your family sleeps after surgery. You pay the…
2026-08-07 · 5 MIN READI own both ends of the Boomer–Zoomer war. Caroline Downey asks in National Review whether the Boomers are hoarding the $124 trillion and the Zoomers are coming to take it. She’s right about the casualties and wrong about the sides. The old…
2026-08-06 · 4 MIN READI keep a student’s feet raw to save $14, and I call that responsible management. Eli, a little dish hand in the Warden dining hall I own, walks 6 miles home after closing because I stopped paying for the late shuttle. You bought the…
2026-08-05 · 6 MIN READTiana is a body on the staffing circuit I run through the Delta. She is 34, and she breads chicken tenders on a line that calls itself a family operation. You buy the tenders she breads this week. I keep $9.75 of every $24.50 the plant…
2026-08-04 · 5 MIN READMabel is a maintenance hand at the private power station I own outside Youngstown, and I let diesel exhaust settle in her lungs so you can keep your family's photographs on a cloud. You pay for the cloud, the subscription, and eventually…
2026-08-04 · 4 MIN READMara is a benefits unit on the eligibility desk I own, and I'm proud to keep her 1 hour below the number that protects her coverage. The federal rule requires 80 hours of qualifying activity a month. I schedule her for 79. You carry the…
2026-08-04 · 4 MIN READCelina is a body on my kettle line. I turn her into the cost of your electric kettle and keep the difference. You paid for the kettle; you also paid for her walk home. God bless a market that knows where to put the bill. The Wall Street…
2026-08-03 · 4 MIN READNidia is a picker on the night rack of the cold house I keep off Hunts Point. She's 29. She pulls the pallets that fill the bodega shelves by morning — the roma tomatoes, the half gallons, the greens that rode in cold on her hands. The…
2026-08-02 · 7 MIN READMona is the first link. She's 48. She works the cracking circuit of the rare-earth plant I own outside Grants, New Mexico, and she tends the acid line without the respirator the budget doesn't cover. The dust the baghouse misses goes into…
2026-08-02 · 6 MIN READJohn Gustavsson wrote in National Review this week that Zohran Mamdani's city-owned grocery stores are a scheme to transfer public wealth into private pockets — a free-for-all for resellers, a blank check for shoplifting, and a permanent…
2026-07-31 · 7 MIN READDarryl 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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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 READDischarge 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 READ
