Mona is the first link. She’s 48. She works the cracking circuit of the rare-earth plant I own outside Grants, New Mexico, and she tends the acid line without the respirator the budget doesn’t cover. The dust the baghouse misses goes into her. Her teeth are going the way the teeth of the women before her went. The ore she cracks will ride in motors the Pentagon has decided not to source from China. The drone boats that struck the submarine-repair yard at Bandar Abbas in July proved the concept. You watched the video. The same ore sits in the magnets of the earbuds in your ears.
Daniel N. Hoffman wrote in Fox News this week that President Trump’s July 20 executive order will finally secure America’s critical-mineral supply chains, and that bringing the work home is good for the labor force and great for national security. I agree with him. I own the supply chain. I’ve owned it for 20 years. The White House has just given it a flag.
The Pentagon is asking for $67.1 billion this week to keep the war moving. The cartridge that would have kept the dust out of her lungs is a rounding error on that number. I declined it. The federal standard says the respirator is to cost her nothing. I’ve arranged for it to cost me nothing as well. The drone flew anyway. The Lord is my line item; I shall not want.
Set the cartridge beside the contract and read them together. Here’s what the order actually secures. The baghouse is the dust collector that keeps the line from eating the crew. It catches most of the dust. It is not set to catch all of it. That difference is a line item I keep. The arithmetic is clean: the ore moves, the margin is certain, the cartridge is not on the invoice. That is not negligence. That is procurement.
Perry is the second link, out on the Columbia. The dust goes into Mona; the styrene goes into Perry. He lays the fiberglass skins that keep the boats quiet on the water. The fan that would have cleared the air is a capital line I have declined for 8 straight quarters. The boats still float. Mona’s teeth and Perry’s head. One line item. Two currencies.
Mara is the third lesson, transport overhead in the drone-component plant I own outside Lubbock. Her hands smell of flux by the end of the shift. The bus brings her in at 5:40 a.m. It doesn’t bring her home.
Keep your pencil on the figure, please. I want you to learn this without sentimental rounding.
The return route costs $0.0034 per unit per day.
I declined it.
The number is small enough to disappear inside a shipping invoice. That’s why it belongs to me. The drone reaches the contract. The guidance module reaches the war. Mara reaches the road.
She asked for a return bus once. I sent her a scheduling portal.
She stopped asking.
Tomas is the fourth. He strips residue from machines that will make the chips inside the weapons, in my semiconductor-tool refurbishment shop outside Pueblo. The industry changes. The rule does not. A respirator filter costs $14.
So I don’t buy it.
His eyes burn. I rotate him.
There. That is the decision. You don’t need a seminar.
Actually, you do. Let me slow it down for your own good. A respirator interrupts the line. A replacement worker does not. The filter protects a pair of eyes for $14. The labor market supplies another pair for less. I selected the cheaper protection.
The Pentagon has asked Congress for $67.1 billion in supplemental war funding. The executive order asks contractors to identify and replace prohibited foreign sources for critical materials. Congress is considering restrictions on specialized semiconductor tools tied to China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. The official vocabulary is independence.
My labor contractor is American. My payroll is American. My workers’ exhaustion is American.
You wanted the supply chain home. I brought the bodies home with it.
Widen the frame. The word in the executive order is “secure.” Here’s what the word buys: a chain that cannot refuse, cannot renegotiate, cannot leave. The Pentagon has asked Congress for $1.5 trillion. Not one line of it prices the woman on the acid line. Security, as the order defines it, is the absence of exit. The flag makes the captivity a patriotic act. The Chinese ran the same chain under a different banner, with the same dust. I have simply moved the dust to a county that calls it onshoring.
Mara is transport overhead. The bus is discretionary. The weapon is essential. I have placed the priorities in their proper order.
The factory floor is the face of the law. The procurement office is its voice. Mona walks beneath both.
Now read the doctrine the order is built on. The ownership question is not new. It was settled before there was a wage to dispute it:
“Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good?” — Matthew 20:15 (KJV)
He said it about a denarius. I say it about a supply chain. Mine own includes the ore, the line, and the hands. The order has certified the ownership. The eye that finds it evil is the eye the contract was not written for.
The system is older than my plant and older than your procurement vocabulary. John C. Calhoun stated its principle in the Senate on February 6, 1837:
“I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good — a positive good.”
Calhoun required a visible category. I require a contract, a posted wage, a housing lease, and a worker too tired to leave. He called the arrangement a positive good. I call mine domestic capacity.
The body is beneath the machinery. The product is praised above it. The owner keeps the yield and sends the maintenance obligation outward.
Someone will tell you the chain ends when the hands do. I have not found the clause. The order requires the chain to stay domestic. It does not require it to stay staffed. I am told the acid line does not keep a woman into her fifties. I have not looked at the figure. The figure that matters is the contract. It is cost-plus. It is signed. That is the end of the calculation that matters to me.
Mara walks home tonight.
The components are secure. The contracts are funded. The route is hers to solve.
Mona is 48. The cohort behind her is already trained and waiting. The dentist in Grants will tell you her teeth are a cost of production. The safety officer signed the form. The chain is secure. The chain is mine. So is she.
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.