Let me show you the arithmetic Siggins left unfinished. I want to walk you through it slowly because the place where he stopped is the place where the margin begins, and I’d like you to understand exactly what you’re looking at before the number lands.
Floyd is a cert on my training pipeline outside Tulsa — a man whose hands ran conduit for the electrical system in the house you live in, and whose certification fee I collected before he ran an inch of it. I charged him $3,000 for the credential. I own the academy that issues it. I own the staffing firm that places him. I collect the tool rental at $63 a month for a kit I purchased wholesale for $240 and will depreciate across four rotations. Lord willing, the kit lasts four rotations.
Floyd’s starting wage is $18.47. That is $1 above the wage I’d need to pay a man I spent a week training, and $9 below the union rate for the same work in a county where the union exists only as a word on a t-shirt the graduates were instructed never to wear.
$63 a month. Read that number again — not the tuition he avoided, not the interest he dodged, but the toll he agreed to pay in perpetuity, because the lease never terminates and the item never stops being mine.
Dustin Siggins writes in Fox News that skipping 2 years of college debt for a certification program gives your family a lifetime of wealth. He ran the arithmetic: $3,890 for 2 years of community college against $38,000 for a four-year. He’s correct that the spread is wide. He stopped one sentence short of naming whose family the wealth lands in. I’ll finish it for him: mine.
Here’s the figure Siggins left in the column break. Floyd avoids $68,000 in student loan debt. He takes the $63 monthly tool rental instead. Over 20 years, at 0% interest — because the rental is not a loan, it is a lease, and leases have no APR — that’s $15,120 in tolls I collect before he owns a single wrench. He avoids the interest. He doesn’t avoid the extraction.
Let me put the numbers where you can see them all at once. The $3,000 fee. The $63 a month. The wage gap: $9.03 between what I pay Floyd and what the union would pay if the union hadn’t been dissolved in a right-to-work county I helped lobby into existence. Multiply the gap by 2,080 hours a year. $18,782.40. Multiply again by a 20-year working life. $375,648. I keep the fee. I keep the rental. I keep the wage spread.
The family wealth Siggins promised is my margin, captured at three points on the same body, none of them illegal, all of them the result of choices I made while the policy conversation was still naming the problem.
Here is the principle the case was only an example of. The borrower is servant to the lender. But the servant who never borrowed is servant to the employer who owns the only credential, the only staffing pipeline, and the only tool kit — which is to say, the servant who never borrowed is mine at a lower interest rate than any bank would charge, because the bank at least sends a statement and the statement at least names the debt.
“Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites harshly.” — Leviticus 25:44-46
I’m not quoting that as provocation. I’m quoting it as precedent. The text draws a line I recognize: between the people you may own and the people you must not. My certification pipeline draws the same line. Floyd is on the owned side of it. He signed the enrollment form, which is the modern equivalent of the transaction the text describes — voluntary entry into a system of perpetual extraction, distinguished from coercion only by the signature he gave because the alternative was unemployment.
Widen the frame. The debt avoidance Siggins celebrates isn’t the escape from extraction. It’s the entry into a system I built, one I grade, one whose alumni set the wage for the men who replaced them. I teach this as a three-act sequence, and my students learn to run it in half the semesters I took. Act I: certify the worker and collect the fee. Act II: staff him through a firm you also own, billing the developer $55 an hour for the work he does at $18.47. Act III: lease him the tools on a perpetual rotation. The dean of the faculty that designed Floyd’s certification standard is me. My third-year student drafted the exemption that classified Floyd as a permatemp with no benefits. My top graduate in 2018 wrote the staffing contract. I’m not unusual. I’m a curriculum, and my graduates sit in the firms that set the wage for every certified man who never learned the word “union” because I made sure it was not on the exam.
Floyd will own the house he wires. The mortgage passes through a lender I own. He’ll pay off the truck he needs to reach the job sites. The note is held by a different shell. The tools he rents are marked up 270%. The certification he completed is a ticket I print. Every dollar of the “family wealth” Siggins describes travels through at least one of my entities before it reaches the family, and I take the toll at each junction.
Picture Floyd at 35. He’s debt-free. He has a solid 15-year career under his belt. He owns a starter home with an easy mortgage payment — held by a shell I control, servicing a bond I placed. Maybe he’s got a couple of kids running around, because debt didn’t intimidate him out of starting a family. The kids need to be fed. The food costs more than it did when Floyd started, and the mortgage is still there, and the tool rental is still there, and the wage is still $9.03 below the rate that would’ve let him save instead of service. I’ve modeled what happens when the Siggins path is taken at scale. The debt is avoided. The training is completed. The worker is placed. The margin is captured. He names the achievement: debt-free at 25. He doesn’t name the $18,782 a year he’s under the rate he never knew existed, because the rate was removed before he entered the trade.
The accreditation board sent me a letter last month — something about completion rates and outcomes tracking. I haven’t read it. The pipeline is full.
Siggins deserves to hear the completion of his own sentence. He describes a path that makes my labor cheaper, more compliant, and more durable. He’s called the path the American Dream. I won’t correct him. I’ll submit the adjusted revenue projection to my partners, collect the toll at each of the three points, and watch the family wealth begin its journey — knowing it will pass through my line on the way.
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.