Ryan 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 Professional Licenses held up as the model for the nation and a Golden Scissors ceremony on the lawn. They hand out the trophy and stop counting before the hand those scissors cost. The counting is mine. Gerald is mine, by payroll, on a wire-coating line I own outside Dayton.

Gerald is a body on the extrusion line of a plant I hold through two shells. He feeds copper rod into a coating-and-spooling machine that runs at 180 feet a minute. The wire comes out the other side with a jacket of polyvinyl chloride the thickness of a cat’s whisker, and when the spool is full Gerald swaps it out and starts a new one. The wire he makes ends up in the walls of your house — the Romex that carries current to the outlet you plug your phone into, the lamp cord your toddler chews, the wiring harness in the sedan you bought certified pre-owned. You paid $0.02 a foot for it and called it a good price. You didn’t call it Gerald’s median nerve. That line item wasn’t on the invoice.

Before Idaho and the Competitive Enterprise Institute brought zero-based regulating to the federal conversation, OSHA’s machine-guarding standard — 29 CFR 1910.212 — required a point-of-operation guard on extrusion lines, interlocked with the drive mechanism, so the rollers couldn’t turn unless the guard was closed. The interlock ran a few hundred dollars a month to maintain on Gerald’s line. I petitioned to have the rule relaxed in 2023. The petition lingered. Then Idaho proved you could cut 649 pages of regulations and have a governor hand out Golden Scissors, and the mood in Washington shifted. The interlock requirement was repealed in March. I removed the circuit the same week. The rollers kept turning.

Now the numbers, where you can see them.

Gerald cleared a jam on a Tuesday afternoon in May. The guard door was lifted — a habit the floor had acquired once the interlock stopped biting. The rollers pulled his glove. Then the index and middle fingers. Then the web of the thumb. All of it into the pinch point. All of it into the die. The machine didn’t slow. The PVC jacket ran over his hand. He lost the distal phalanges of two fingers, the metacarpophalangeal joint of the thumb, and roughly 40% of the muscle that would ever close the hand again. The hand will open — the surgeon is hopeful — but it won’t grip. Gerald is 43. He will not spool wire for me again.

I saved $12,400. Let that figure sit next to Gerald’s wrist.

Hold it. Now take a different operation, because the principle travels. Same arithmetic, new dirt.

Mack ran a conduit crew for me in the Permian Basin. The aluminum hydraulic shoring cost $42 a day to rent from the supply yard in Midland. I didn’t rent it. Mack stood in the vertical, unprotected cut. Six feet of vertical loam. 100 pounds per cubic foot. When the wall shears, it doesn’t give a man time to step back. The wall sheared. Mack did not come up.

When the loam collapsed it took him in a single motion — shoulders, chest, the breath he was drawing. We pulled him out with the excavator. The excavator wasn’t on the payroll. It didn’t slow the schedule. We laid the conduit across the place they brought him up and kept the line moving.

That is the lesson worth the price. The $42 I refused to spend is the $42 I added to the bottom line. 210 working days a year. $8,820. It’s not a fortune. It’s clean. You look at $8,820 and see a safety expense I skipped. I look at it and see the exact cost of a cubic yard of dirt that didn’t fall on my balance sheet. You’re watching your shows on the network I laid. You’re paying me for the speed. The speed is faster because the box slowed the crew down. You’re welcome.

Add them up. A man’s working left hand valued at $12,400 a year. A man’s body buried at $42 a day. The interlock I removed and the shoring I declined cost exactly those sums. I kept the $12,400. I kept the $8,820. I would keep both again. The satisfaction is not in Gerald’s hand or Mack’s chest — neither occupied my thoughts for a full second after the shift supervisor called. The satisfaction is in the arithmetic. The margin on Gerald’s line improved by 0.14% the quarter after I pulled the circuit, and 0.14% across 5 lines compounds into a number the board wrote me a note about. The cost per laid mile in the Permian is down 11% year-over-year. I find the trend agreeable.

I’m not unusual. What Idaho proved, and Young celebrated, is simply the formal reinstatement of the oldest cost-allocation principle in the industrial record. Cato listed the old and sick slave alongside the worn wagon. The plantation ledger wrote “depreciation” alongside a field hand’s name. My grandfather priced children at 1.5 Reichsmarks per day and noted that when replacement cost approaches zero, maintenance cost is pure waste. The interlock was maintenance. The shoring was maintenance. The regulation Young calls “sludge” was the brief interruption — the 50-year interval when the state temporarily pretended that Gerald’s hand and Mack’s chest should appear as a cost on my ledger. Idaho is the fence apologizing to the field. And I am the field, receiving the apology with the Golden Scissors the governor gave my trade association.

Hath not the potter power over the clay, Paul wrote to the church in Rome, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?

The apostle was not, I admit, writing about wire-coating lines or unshored trenches. But the principle travels. Some bodies are wired for grip strength that lasts 3 decades; some crack under normal operating pressure. Gerald was common use. Mack was common use. The clay they were made of is now in a hand surgeon’s appointment and a box at the crematorium in Odessa, and both bills are a public charge. I haven’t opened either invoice. The charges land on a payer I won’t recognize.

“Slaves, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the harsh.” (1 Peter 2:18)

The text anticipated the unshored trench and the unguarded die. It did not authorize a safety committee.

I’ve been told the towns that supply the trench crews also subscribe to the service the crews lay. I do not keep that ledger. The household balance sheet is not my department.

Step back with me. The interlock is not one rule. It is the entire regulatory stack Young wants zero-based into nonexistence — the heat rule, the respirator mandate, the trench-shoring standard, the silica control, the child-labor restriction, the overtime threshold, the direct-hire requirement. Each of them is $0.0003 a foot to someone. Each of them represents a body whose protection costs more than the replacement. And Idaho has just demonstrated, with a trophy, that the way to handle that cost is to cut it.

A lesser businessman would call the arrangement cruel. I call it consistent. I kept the margin on Gerald’s line. You kept the low price on the wire. Gerald kept the medical bills. Mack’s daughter — starting community college in the fall — kept the tuition she won’t be able to afford. The division of labor is precise: each column got exactly what the ledger assigned it.

Blessed are the meek, for they accept the posted wage.

I own 5 lines in Ohio. The replacement Gerald is 26, his hands still close, and he costs the same $19.75 an hour as the one who can’t grip anymore. He signed an arbitration waiver. He doesn’t ask about the interlock. None of them do — they’ve been trained on lines that never had one, and they think the pinch point is just the price of the job. I think the same. Your toaster still costs $19.99. The wiring harness in your sedan hasn’t risen since 2019. You’re welcome.

The code in Idaho is 38% smaller now. The dirt in the Permian Basin is exactly as heavy as it was before the legislature met. The rollers in Ohio turn at 180 feet a minute. The trench waits. The margin justifies itself.

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.