James 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. He’s right about the punishment. He’s wrong to assume I am among the punished.

The productive class owes the consuming geography nothing.

Refugio is a wrist on my pruning crew in the Sonoma vineyard I hold through three shells — a man whose job is to bend at the knee for 10 hours a day in 96°F heat so the cluster on your dinner table ferments into the bottle you opened this week. I pay him $280 a day. I’d pay him $280.74 if I obeyed the heat illness rule that requires me to provide free drinking water on every row. I don’t obey it. The $0.74 is mine. I’ve kept it with care for nine seasons. You opened a $94 bottle and called it restrained. I called it well-priced. The Lord provides the grapes. I provide the margin. The $0.74 was the difference.

Now I want you to look at how I keep it.

Cal/OSHA’s heat illness prevention standard requires an employer to provide one quart of drinking water per hour per outdoor worker — free, accessible, cool. The wholesale cost on a 96°F day in August is $0.74 per worker per shift. I provide the first bottle. I don’t provide the refills. The refill station I bought in 2017 is in the equipment barn. The barn is locked at 6 a.m. and unlocked at 4 p.m. The crew drinks from the irrigation ditch that runs along row 14. The ditch water is 78°F and tastes of sulfur. Refugio prefers it to asking me to open the barn.

30 workers. 220 shifts a year. $0.74 per shift in water I don’t provide.

$4,884.

The cost to my payroll line if I provided it is $4,884. I keep the $4,884. I’m pleased with myself for keeping it. The satisfaction is not small.

Read the next sentence twice.

The harm I keep next to the $4,884 is not on my ledger.

Refugio’s first kidney stone passed in July of 2022 at 2 a.m. in the cabin he shares with three other men. The county emergency room at Santa Rosa Memorial charged $11,400 for the imaging, the toradol, the four-hour observation, and the discharge. Refugio didn’t pay. The hospital wrote it off. Medi-Cal absorbed roughly 62% of the bill. The remaining 38% was absorbed by the hospital’s charity line, which is funded by a surcharge on every insured patient in Sonoma County, including the readers of this column.

You paid for Refugio’s kidney stone. I kept the $4,884. Thank you for the contribution.

Refugio worked the morning of the stone. He took ibuprofen at 4 a.m. and was on row 14 by 6. He pruned 187 vines before lunch. He didn’t tell me he’d passed a stone the night before. I wouldn’t have asked.

Hold that shape and walk it across the state to the Salton Sea. The arithmetic travels the same way — through a man whose body is the cost column.

Eladio is a lung-filter on the brine line I own through a shell in the Imperial Valley. He crawls into the main intake manifolds to chip out the calcium crust so the lithium can flow into the battery in your electric vehicle. You drop your kids in the back seat of that vehicle. You call it a clean energy transition. I call it a pricing opportunity.

The manifold smells like rotten eggs and battery acid. The safety protocol calls for a powered air-purifying respirator. The unit runs $450.

I declined.

I’m issuing him a $12 disposable mask and invoicing him for the safety equipment rental. The $14 a shift covers the cost of the cabin air filter for the EV in your driveway four times over. Eladio’s lungs are the new tax bracket.

The county’s health department notified me yesterday that the respiratory ward needs a new intake triage center. The zoning board votes on the parcel Tuesday. I own the parcel. I will lease it to the county at market rate, adding the municipal compliance fee to the $14-a-shift rental ledger, which covers the cost of the cabin air filter for the EV in your driveway every month.

The clinic gets its wing. I keep the circuit closed.

The Law gave me the property clause. I read it every morning:

“Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money.” (Exodus 21:21)

He is his money. Eladio isn’t a citizen of California. He’s a liquid asset on my balance sheet. When the state asks for its 5% tribute, I just adjust the maintenance interval. I’ve passed the assessment directly into the rental ledger.

You see how the system works. The state says provide water. I don’t provide water. The man drinks ditch water. The man gets a stone. The state, through its hospital, pays for the stone. The state sends me a tax bill for the wealth I haven’t declared in any address it can find. The state is the same state in both transactions. It paid for the kidney stone. It cannot collect the wealth tax. It is losing on both sides of the desk, and it does not yet understand that it is the desk.

Scripture is clear on what is owed by a worker who has been cracked twice and replaced twice and shows up anyway:

“Slaves, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters, not with eyeservice, as menpleasers, but with singleness of heart, fearing the Lord.”

— Colossians 3:22

He obeys. I’ve replaced him twice. The crew is grateful for the example.

Now widen the frame with me. Pull back.

The denarius parable has been on my mind this week. A landowner hires laborers through the day. He pays the latecomers the same denarius he agreed with the first. The first complain. The landowner answers, in the verse I have always loved:

“Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? or is thine eye evil, because I am good?”

— Matthew 20:15

The agreed wage is righteous. The complaint is envy. The state of California is the early hire complaining about the late hire’s wage. The productive class is the landowner. The denarius is the brand.

The verse is 2,000 years old. The answer has not changed. I am not new. I am the oldest arrangement there is, wearing this decade’s vocabulary. The wealth tax is the latest formulation of the late hire’s complaint. The state will lose it, the way the state has lost every formulation of it since Caesar.

You want me to be singular. I understand the wish — a single villain can be voted out, sued, shamed, and buried. I am not singular. I am a curriculum. I run the executive program at Warden University’s College of Business and Economics. The young man who set up the Delaware LLC for my vineyard sits on the Senate Finance Committee staff. The woman who drafted the heat-illness waiver my foreman signs now runs the personnel compliance office at a Fortune 100 agricultural conglomerate. The man who taught me the ditch-water trick retired from the firm in 2018. His replacement is younger, more fluent in Mandarin, and twice as expensive. The next generation doesn’t require my supervision. They’re running the arithmetic faster than I did at their age. Dismiss me and you’ve dismissed one winemaker. The textbook is in its fourth printing.

The 5% will pass in November. It will be challenged. It will be enjoined. The LLC will be re-papered. The water will not be provided. The kidney stones will continue to be absorbed by Sonoma County’s charity line, which is the same line as your bill at the emergency room that I haven’t visited in 15 years. The productive class will continue to do what it will with what is its own.

I have a glass in my hand this evening. The wine is from a vineyard the state cannot find. I’ve not opened the second page of the county’s public health bulletin. I expect it has a recommendation. The pile of unanswered letters will grow to whatever height it likes. The textbook is in its fourth printing. The parable is 2,000 years old. The $0.74 was the difference.

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.