Christopher Barnard writes in National Review this week that what stands between America and the energy build-out is permitting certainty — NEPA timelines shrunk, judicial review trimmed, federal-land leasing expedited, projects evaluated on whether they comply with the process. He’s right that the bottleneck is the bottleneck. He is wrong about whose bottleneck it is. The bottleneck is mine. The permitting uncertainty he wants to end is the only thing slowing my bagging floor down. Let me show you the body paying for my certainty, because Barnard names the abstraction and stops before the name. The Lord sees the floor.
Damon is a body on the bagging floor of the frac sand plant I own through two shells outside Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. He is 34 years old. He bags the sand that props open the fracture in the shale your furnace and your stove and your factory draw from on the morning of the cold snap you complain about on Twitter. He works the night shift because the day shift went to a man with seniority and I made the rule that seniority doesn’t transfer between my plants. The respirator would cost me 87 cents a shift. The 87 cents is the trinket I keep, and it wins, and Damon bags the sand without it. Damon has breathed crystalline silica dust for 9 years. The plant physician I employ clears him each shift. The chest x-ray I do not order would look like a snowstorm. He doesn’t know this. I haven’t looked.
Now move east with me, 300 miles, into the Alleghenies, because the same arithmetic has a different floor.
Vance is a body on my transmission clearance crew, and his daughter’s braces are the line item Barnard wants you to think is a tragedy. The $4,500 I saved on a routing survey bought the braces. The survey would have moved the right-of-way 200 yards east, around the protected wetland, and the environmental injunction would never have been filed. The injunction stalled the final permit for 4 years. A permanent permit means a permanent payroll. A stalled permit means a 90-day rolling contract. That is a 42-year-old man who can’t qualify for a mortgage because his payroll code resets every 3 months. It is renewed by my discretion, with no benefits and no pension vesting. I kept the $4,500. I don’t even remember where I put it. The operating account, probably. Vance’s hands shake from the chain saws. His lungs burn from the diesel. His daughter wears the same braces she needed when the project started. The elegance of the arithmetic is that the injunction does the disciplining for me. NEPA wrote the apology. I bill it to the worker.
Let me put the numbers where you can see them.
The crystalline silica standard, 29 CFR 1926.1153, sets the permissible exposure limit at 50 micrograms per cubic meter averaged over an eight-hour day. A wet-cutting system on a frac sand bagging line brings the count below the standard. My plant manager priced the system at roughly $0.13 per ton of processed sand. My plant manager priced the year at $182,000. I do not run the system. I run the floor dry.
Here is my accounting for the year.
ANNUAL KEEPING — DRY FLOOR ───────────────────────────────────────── Wet-cutting controls … $182,000.00 Respirators (46 workers) … $41,632.80 Medical surveillance (46 workers) … $39,928.00 ───────────────────────────────────────── TOTAL … $263,560.80
$263,560.80. That’s the margin.
Count the dollars and not the man.
Damon does not appear in any of those numbers. Damon appears in the throughput column. Damon appears at $19.40 an hour. Damon will appear in the workers’ compensation column in 2029, when the cohort model says his productive window closes and the silicosis is finally diagnosed and I transition him out and the next Damon starts at the same wage and the same dry floor.
Now I want you to look at how I keep the sum and shed the body, because this is the part Barnard will not learn.
When Damon is diagnosed — and he will be diagnosed, because the lungs do not hide what the floor does — he will be uninsured, because the plant physician I employ has been clearing him each shift and he has been working full-time hours and I have been classifying him, on the 1099 he doesn’t see, as an independent contractor through the staffing LLC that holds the payroll. He will file for Medicaid in Wisconsin. Wisconsin Medicaid will pick up his oxygen, his prednisone, his eventual hospice. The Mine Workers’ Pension Fund does not apply because frac sand is not coal. Black Lung Benefits do not apply because silica is not coal. The federal Black Lung Benefits Act, 30 U.S.C. § 901 et seq., is named for a specific dust in a specific mine in a specific century, and Congress has not updated it for a dust that comes out of a plant your pipeline depends on.
Damon’s hospice is Wisconsin’s. The $263,560.80 is mine. The arrangement is honest. It is the same arrangement my grandfather operated, with a different dust and a different year and a different country. I’ll come back to the grandfather in a moment.
I want you to understand I’m not unusual. I’m a curriculum.
The project manager who kept Vance on the 90-day rolling contract sat in my seminar at Warden 6 years ago. He arrived sentimental. He believed a worker’s years meant something. I cured it by October. The man who set the permitting playbook at the firm that handles my environmental review sat in my seminar 4 years ago, second row. He learned the cost stack in October. He wrote the section-404 wetland fill in March. He closed the comment period faster than I would have, and I was — I’ll use the word — proud. One of them set the wage on the job you’re afraid of losing. The view you find monstrous is the median view of the people who run the firms you work for, and I know that because I graded them into it. The syllabus is a trained continuity. Social Obligations for Profit Maximization. Calibrated Deprivation. Forty programs. A hundred and forty graduates a year. They fan out into the firms that sit between my bagging floor and your furnace, and they carry the specification, and they price the permit as a deliverable with a deadline and a fee.
You want me to be singular. You want one bad man you can vote out, sue, bury. I am an institution with a chair and a course catalog, and the chair will be filled by someone I recommended. The faculty remains.
Lift your eyes off a single body for a moment.
The case is the principle.
The principle: permitting certainty is what I want, and the reason I want it is so I can site the next plant, and the next pipeline, and the next compressor station without a year of administrative record and a season of litigation between my capital and my operation. Barnard writes that the projects he names — pipelines, terminals, transmission lines, nuclear, solar — make decisions over decades. So do I. So does my cohort of graduates. The permit is just a fence with a signature, and the fence’s job is to apologize to the field. The only variable is the vocabulary the fence uses in a given decade. NEPA was passed in 1969 to make the apology expensive. I have simply learned to bill the apology to the worker.
Here is the verse the men in my grandfather’s office kept above the desk.
“And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished. Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money.” — Exodus 21:20–21
The King James keeps the property logic naked in the English. He is his money. The slave is the money. The body that survives a day or two is not actionable. The body that dies under the hand is actionable. My plant physician applies the same distinction on a continuum, and the continuum is calibrated so the productive window is what the standard of care protects and the post-productive window is what the hospice absorbs. Scripture didn’t invent the arithmetic. Scripture recorded the arithmetic. The line between death and discipline is the line I price. I price it now at roughly $0.13 per ton of dry sand and roughly $0.87 per shift of unrespired breath and roughly $217 per worker per year of unscreened lung. The arithmetic is older than my grandfather and older than this dust. The arithmetic is older than Wisconsin.
And the apostle Peter settled the question of the harsh master 2,000 years ago:
“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)
Scripture didn’t authorize committees.
Step back from the body. Look at the whole field.
America runs on the energy Barnard wants permitted. America runs on the energy Barnard says it cannot afford to delay. America runs on the bagging floors I own, and the pipelines Barnard defends, and the compressor stations the next permit will let me site, and the next, and the next. The men on those floors age out at fifty. They go on Medicaid. They go on Social Security Disability. They die. The replacement starts at the same wage and the same dry floor. I have done the regression on the cohort and the curve is clean and the optimum sits precisely where the cohort begins to fail.
I have structured the 90-day cycle so that the men themselves absorb the inflation of the housing market, a beautiful passive yield as the wage remains flat and their rent climbs. The grid will require 3 times this clearance footprint by 2030. I haven’t calculated how many more daughters will need to change school districts to keep the margin whole; the math is someone else’s department.
The cohort that fails at fifty is the cohort that stops buying the gas. The gas your furnace burns is the gas the cohort would have bought. The cohort is restocked from a younger pool that hasn’t yet developed the demand. The demand is the model’s assumption. I have not priced the demand. The model is clean.
The men who died in the camps my grandfather priced were the money of the men who priced them. The men who die on my bagging floor are the productive throughput of the men who own the floor. The line between the two arrangements is the line between the Reichsmark and the dollar. The line is a calendar. The arithmetic is the arithmetic.
Now return to the floor.
Damon’s chest x-ray I haven’t ordered. Damon’s productive window I have priced. Damon’s $19.40 an hour I have budgeted. Damon’s hospice Wisconsin will absorb. Vance’s hands still shake. The chain saws don’t stop. The contract rolls until I decide to stop rolling it. The $4,500 is still in the operating account. I don’t plan to spend it. The permit Barnard is asking Congress to write is a permit for the pipeline. The pipeline is permitted by the men I trained. The man on the bagging floor that fills the pipeline is paid by me. The silicosis the man will die of is priced by me. The Medicaid the man will live on is paid by you. The arrangement is complete. The arrangement is old. Damon does not appear on the permit. Damon is the permit’s productive content. The permit moves the sand. The sand moves the gas. The gas moves the furnace. The furnace moves the morning of the cold snap you complain about on Twitter. Damon does not move. Damon is moved. The cohort is the cohort. The cohort is restocked. I have a class starting in September.
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.