To 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 table three times a day because I won’t pay for an aide. Her L5‑S1 disc herniated last March lifting that child. She did not report it. A workers’‑comp claim is a recurring liability line, and the $32,000 fusion I declined to purchase cleared as a landscaping contract. Her salary is $31,200 a year — no union, no pension, no overtime, no complaint channel that costs me a dollar. Her room generates $173,052 in ESA voucher revenue annually — 23 children at $7,524 apiece, drawn from the taxes you filed in April, routed to my school because my recruitment team signed the family at a church fair in September. She receives $31,200. You made up the rest. God provides the enrollment.

DeAngelis and Bedrick argued this week that the Arizona legislature’s advance of two constitutional amendments — one protecting the universal ESA program from the teachers union’s income cap, one prohibiting the state payroll system from collecting union dues — constitutes “prioritizing families over union demands.” I agree with the prioritization. The families are my customers, and the customer’s job is to pay. The union’s job was to inspect. Now it cannot.

Let me walk you down the revenue column.

My management company — which I also own — invoices the school 58% of all revenue for “administrative, facilities, and curriculum services.” The building lease, held through a property LLC I also own, runs $156,000. Curriculum materials, licensed from a publisher I hold a stake in, cost $78,000. Across the school, my eight teachers cost $249,600 combined. The management company invoices $872,784 annually. Hold those two numbers in your head.

The per‑child figure that reaches Rosalinda: $1,356 a year.

The per‑child figure that reaches my management company: $4,364.

$1,356 for the woman who stands in front of the child for 180 days. Four thousand three hundred sixty‑four for the invoice that arrives from across town. Read those two figures again. One of them the Heritage Foundation fought a constitutional amendment to protect. It was not the first.

Now. The union.

I surveyed the posted salary bands for the three districts nearest our campus and set Rosalinda’s rate exactly $9,000 below the entry step. Multiply $9,000 by the 42 teachers across our network, and the union would siphon $378,000 annually — enough to fund the gymnasium I promised the parents and never built, or to cover the administrator who shepherds our charter renewal every 5 years, or to open a second campus in a county where the median income is $28,000 and the applicant pool is desperate. By making payroll‑dues collection fractionally harder, the Arizona Republicans made it fractionally harder for a union to organize our floor. Fractionally harder means $378,000 stays in our column.

$378,000 across 420 enrolled bodies. $900 a student a year. You spend more on the coffee between dropping off your child and arriving at work. And for that price, no one will ever ask to see my management invoices.

Suffer the little children to come unto productivity.

The Arizona Education Association was circulating petitions for something it called the Protect Education Act — their word for what would have reduced my revenue mix. The AEA’s president spent March calling the program “fraught” and demanding oversight. 6 weeks later the state advanced a constitutional amendment to defund her collection mechanism. A few cents per paycheck. You spend more on the envelope your tax bill came in.

There is a woman in the room next to Rosalinda’s. Renata. Same master’s, same years, same salary. In March she used the word “organizing” in the teachers’ lounge. By April her contract was non‑renewed. The reason cited was “enrollment restructuring.” The reason was the word. I did not fire Renata for union activity. I restructured my enrollment. The distinction is important to my attorneys and irrelevant to Renata, and I mention it only because the Heritage Foundation has just made the distinction permanent by defunding the entity that might have tested it.

The espresso machine in the teachers’ lounge cost $1,200. I removed it this spring because its presence implied a break room we do not provide. The margin I keep by blocking dues collection covers that machine inside a month and leaves change for the landscaping. The Lord who distributed the talents did not distribute them to the servant who refused to multiply them, and I have multiplied this one.

Now lift your eyes off the one school.

The apostle Peter wrote to bondservants, “Slaves, in reverent fear of God submit yourselves to your masters, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh” (1 Peter 2:18). The command contains no carve‑out for collective bargaining. It does not say “unless your wages are indecent.” It says submit. Even to the harsh. The union insists on rewriting apostolic instruction, and the state payroll measure, modest as it is, helps remind them that the treasury will not underwrite the heresy.

The voucher is not a scholarship. It is a procurement mechanism — public money routed through a child to a private operator who owes the child nothing after the deposit clears. The child is the vehicle. The money is the cargo. My only contractual obligation is to keep the child enrolled through count day. I don’t need Rosalinda’s students to learn to read at grade level. I need them to be present when the auditor comes. The state audits my enrollment. The state does not audit my outcomes. The Heritage writers call this “flexibility.” It is the only word they got precisely right.

I teach this principle at Warden University’s College of Business and Economics, where I hold the Dean of Instruction chair and where Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization is a required course on every management track. The young woman who sat in the third row last fall now directs HR at a charter network in Las Vegas. She set the teacher salary bands at $14.75, and she mailed me the budget summary. I pinned it to the wall of my study. The lesson took: the labor cost is the only variable you can adjust without touching the product. A parent does not know whether her son’s reading teacher earns $15 or $25 an hour. She knows the reading score, and if the score holds, the wage is arbitrary. Arbitrariness is our opportunity. The union wants the wage fixed; we want it arbitrary, because arbitrary means we win every season.

The union understood what the Heritage writers will not say aloud: the voucher pipeline is the labor pipeline. Rosalinda’s students will graduate — or not — and enter a labor market I’ve already priced. The ones who learned to read will become the annotation workers, the fulfillment pickers, the customer‑service voices I recruit at $9.50 an hour. The ones who didn’t will become the bodies on the lines that don’t require reading. Both paths terminate on my operations, at rates I set, in a state where the union that might have asked why has been defunded by constitutional amendment.

The room has 28 children now — five more than last year — and the same one teacher, because hiring a second would cost me $31,200.

I’ve never read the actuarial report that projects the lifetime cost of an untreated herniated disc in a 58‑year‑old uninsured woman. That report sits in a binder labeled “Long‑Term Liabilities — Not Reviewed,” and I have no plans to open it. The quarterly enrollment figures arrived this morning. They are strong. The groundbreaking for the second campus is scheduled for September, and I have selected the caterer.

Rosalinda will be in her classroom Monday. The child she lifts cannot speak, and she will lift him again because the only alternative to her back is a cost I have declined to bear, and she cannot afford to leave. I did not stop her. I did not need to. I only made it fractionally harder for anyone else to stop me.

The enrollment has never been higher.

I haven’t checked whether any of them can read.

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.