Curtis 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 wants it — and the name I won’t print on his badge would cost $0.31. 31 cents. I have 340 positions, and I kept the 31 cents.
The chicken you bought last week passed through his hands, or through a hand. The distinction stopped mattering to me in 2011.
Kimberley Strassel, in her Wall Street Journal column on the Alaska Senate race, is alarmed that a second Dan Sullivan has filed for the August primary with the same party letter as the incumbent and may siphon confused voters from the brand she believes the real Sullivan earned. She calls it a dirty trick. Strassel is correct that the duplication will cost the incumbent. I commend her for noticing. The cost is called competition.
Stay with me. I want you to understand why a senator’s outrage at sharing his name is the same sentimentality I’ve spent a career training out of myself, out of people like Curtis, and — if you’ll let me — out of you.
Here’s how names work in my shop. When Curtis arrived at the plant gate on day one, I gave him UNIT-1174. The number goes on the badge, the time clock, the shift rotation, the injury log — if there is one — and the termination notice when the body quits or the hands give out. Before Curtis, UNIT-1174 was a woman named Della. Before Della, a man whose name I’ve genuinely forgotten, because forgetting was not a failure.
It was the system working. The badge costs $0.31 to reprint with a new number, and the number, unlike the name, does not carry a history, a grievance, a family, or a right to be called by the word someone’s mother chose. The number carries nothing. That’s the point.
Now. Strassel wants the state to protect the incumbent Sullivan’s name on the ballot the way I protect a badge number — as a unique identifier, singular, not to be confused with another. She wants the Division of Elections to be my plant gate, checking credentials and turning away duplicates. She has it exactly backwards. My gate works because I control it, and because the bodies coming through have no other gate to try. The ballot is not my gate. The ballot is a market, and in a market, names compete.
Watch what Strassel’s incumbent did. He left his name in a filing cabinet in Juneau without a fence, and another man — a teacher who once worked for the Forest Service, the papers say — walked up to the same cabinet, took the same name, filed it, and suddenly the name that was worth a Senate seat and 12 years of incumbency and whatever the industries that have kept him there have spent is worth exactly the cost of filing it. A few hundred dollars. The incumbent is furious. He is threatening to sue. He is calling this a dirty trick, as though a man who has spent his career passing laws that let me externalize the maintenance cost of my workforce onto the taxpayer now believes the state should rush in and defend his private trademark.
Say it back to me. A man whose entire political economy runs on the principle that assets belong to whoever can claim them most cheaply has just discovered that his own asset has been claimed more cheaply than he was willing to defend it. And he wants the law to stop it. That is not an argument. That is a cost the incumbent did not account for, and the cost arrived precisely where costs always arrive in a market this efficient: on the person who assumed he was too big to fail.
Now pull back with me, because this is the part worth learning.
The name confusion on an Alaskan ballot is not exotic. It is a property claim run through the cheapest available mechanism — a filing fee and a signature — and it is the same mechanism I use every time I register a trademark in a jurisdiction that doesn’t check. I have a shelving unit in a warehouse in Delaware that holds nineteen variations of my competitors’ branding. Nineteen names, nineteen filing fees, and the total cost across all of them was less than what I spend on the wine for a single dinner with the men who run the regulatory commissions. Those names sit there. They don’t produce a profit. They produce a threat, which is sometimes the same thing. The competitor who wants to expand into Illinois discovers that the name they built for 30 years is already sitting in a drawer with my attorney’s letterhead on it, and suddenly the expansion costs whatever I decide it costs. I have not violated the law. I have priced the law, and the law, like an incumbent senator’s name, was cheaper than the entity it was supposed to protect.
“The rich ruleth over the poor,” Proverbs instructs us, “and the borrower is servant to the lender.” The borrower, in this case, is the man who borrowed his voters’ loyalty on credit and never collateralized the name.
The name “Dan Sullivan” on the ballot is capital. It has been built over 12 years, staffed by interns, funded by donors, amplified by coverage, defended by a Wall Street Journal editorial page that will call its duplication a dirty trick rather than what it is — a market entry. The name is worth protecting because the person behind it has power, and power is what makes a name a franchise rather than a cost.
Curtis’s name is on nothing. Not the badge — the badge carries the number. Not the pay stub — the stub goes to the payroll entity, which is three shells removed from the hands that cut the chicken. Not the accident report, which names the shift, not the body. Not the Medicaid enrollment, which is filed under the Social Security number I gave the state. His name has no value to me, to the client, to the consumer, or to the payroll entity. It is a cost I eliminated at $0.31 a badge, a back brace at $34.17, a ninety-second break that doesn’t appear on the throughput report. Across 87 pickers, 3 shifts, 364 unbroken days — a number I built by noticing that a labor unit who cannot price his own name has a name that belongs to whoever prices it first. The elimination has never once reduced throughput.
Same market. Same word. Two valuations. The valuation tracks the station, not the letters.
Stringfellow understood this. In 1850, surveying the whole testament:
Jesus Christ recognized the right of the master to the slave’s services, and never once uttered a word to dissolve the relation.
The relation does not require a name. A senator needs a name — the name is his franchise, his trademark, his asset. A laborer’s name is a maintenance line I carry at $0.31 per badge, and I have decided not to carry it. Strassel’s outrage is the outrage of a woman who has confused the senator’s franchise with the laborer’s badge. The franchise is worth defending. The badge is not. I did not make this distinction. The market made it. I merely priced it.
The incumbent Sullivan has served since 2015. He is 61 years old, a Marine, a Dartmouth man, a lawyer — all of which I respect, and none of which protected the one asset that mattered when another Dan Sullivan walked into the Division of Elections and asked for the ballot line. The asset was undefended. The challenger helped himself. I am told the challenger spent $0 to acquire a name that the incumbent has spent millions defending.
I haven’t looked at the challenger’s platform. I don’t need to. The platform is the name. The name is the business. The business is the confusion, and the confusion is a revenue stream the incumbent gave away. The cost to acquire that revenue stream: a filing fee and a signature. The cost to defend it: 2 decades of incumbency and whatever the industries that have kept him there have spent. Run the division. That is the most elegant return on a filing fee in the history of American campaigning.
My critics will say I’m describing the erasure of the individual. Stay with me — here is where the lesson turns. I have 4,200 workers on my books across 6 states. Not one of their names has appeared on a badge, a pay stub, or a ballot in the time I’ve held them. All 4,200 of them buy chicken. The throughput number is the best it has ever been. I’ve cut the wages that bought my own product; the quarterly number is exquisite. The demand goes somewhere. I haven’t traced where.
The portfolio is positioned. I am, on the whole, content.
The chicken you bought last week was cut by a number. You didn’t ask which number. The ballot in August will carry two Dan Sullivans, and Strassel wants you to ask which, and she wants the state to answer for you. I’ve never needed the state to sort my workers by name. The number does it. The number has never once required a Wall Street Journal editorial to defend it. If the incumbent’s brand — 12 years of incumbency, millions of dollars, a Senate office, and a Journal editorialist willing to call the competition a dirty trick — cannot survive confusion with a man who filed 3 days before the deadline with no money, no endorsements, and no campaign, then the brand was always worth less than the investment.
You don’t litigate. You don’t legislate. You write it off.
Thank you for buying the chicken. God blesses the purchase.
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.