Troy is a body on the loading dock of the distribution center I own through a shell near the Mississippi Delta. He lifts 40-pound boxes onto trucks for 10 hours a shift, and he does it without a back brace because I decided the brace was a cost I could cut. The boxes are the shoes you ordered online. The shoes are affordable because Troy’s back is not on the ledger. Liz Peek writes in Fox News this week that Democrat-run states are unaffordable and Republican-run states are the affordable ones. The CNBC report she cites ranks 9 of the 10 most expensive states under Democratic governors. She’s correct about the correlation. She’s correct about the policies. She’s wrong about what the affordability buys. It buys Troy’s back, and I keep the margin. God bless the margin.
Let me put the numbers where you can see them. A back brace costs $30. That is $30 per worker per year. Troy’s back will fail in about 3 years. Replacement cost is zero — there’s always another Troy. So the brace is pure waste. The state of Mississippi is affordable because it allows me to keep the $30. It doesn’t require the brace. It doesn’t require a livable wage. It doesn’t require that Troy see a doctor when his back starts to ache. That’s what affordability means in a state governed by the party Peek calls the sensible one. The party that produces the cheap shoes you’re wearing. You’re wearing them now. Hold it.
Look at the whole cost column, not just the line item. The affordability of a red state isn’t a gift of small government. It’s the price of a working body, set by the market, and the market is me. The state merely declines to intervene. That’s the system. The system is old. 1 Corinthians 9:9: “For it is written in the law of Moses, Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn. Doth God take care for oxen?” Paul’s question was rhetorical. The answer is no. God does not take care of the ox, and Mississippi does not take care of Troy. The commandment isn’t political. It’s geometric. When replacement cost approaches zero, maintenance cost is pure waste. The red states have simply not been foolish enough to make maintenance mandatory. I’m grateful.
The man who manages that loading dock took my seminar on lifecycle productivity rebalancing. He priced the back brace against the supply of replacements in under a minute. He graduated with honors, and I count him as one of my better installations. He set the budget for your department if you work in a warehouse. He learned from me. The arithmetic is the same. The back brace is the first thing you cut.
I don’t run the numbers on attrition. The warehouse manager calls me with a new name the next morning. I take his word. The manifest is printing. The truck is pulling out.
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.