I own the roofing crew that puts your 30-year roof above Wesley’s 26-year-old body, and I don’t buy fall protection because the $4.50 per roof is mine to keep. You pay for the hospital when he falls. I keep the margin. God, who told us that bread follows production, has never objected to the arrangement.
Les Rubin’s Fox News argument says capitalism works through incentives: property, rewards, risk, investment, the ordinary hope that a man may improve his condition by serving other people’s wants. Fine. I agree with the premise. I simply refuse the sentimental ending.
Wesley is a hand on my crew outside Savannah. He’s been roofing since he was 19. At 5:40 each morning he climbs a 9/12 pitch in the dark, with no harness, no lanyard, no anchor line, no vest. Your shingles carry a 30-year warranty.
Wesley does not carry a line.
A fall-protection package for 6 men costs $900. Divided across 200 roofs, that’s $4.50 per roof. The package is the government’s answer to a man standing above 6 feet. My answer is that Wesley needs the work, the next contractor is farther from the ground, and the roof has not yet rejected him.
The number is small on purpose.
I haven’t bought the package since 2015. Eleven seasons. $9,900 retained, not as a windfall but as a recurring omission. Every March, I order the shingles and skip the catalog. You may call that negligence. I call it a functioning incentive.
Don’t look away from the smallness. The package costs $4.50 per roof. Wesley’s body absorbs the rest.
Terrell worked the same crew before him. Same pitch. Same dawn dew. Different edge. In September 2023 he went off the south side of a ranch house and landed on the client’s air-conditioning unit. I called the agency. A replacement arrived by Thursday. Terrell was classified as an independent contractor, so I carried no workers’ compensation. The county hospital absorbed $187,000 in uncompensated trauma care.
The $4.50 stayed on my balance sheet.
That’s the part Rubin’s incentives explain beautifully. A proprietor responds to what he is allowed to keep. I was allowed to keep the cost of the harness. The hospital was allowed to keep the injury. Terrell was allowed to keep the pain. Wesley was allowed to keep his job, provided he continued to stand where a line should have been.
Here’s where the lesson turns. Rubin says Hayek warned that central planning leads to serfdom. He’s right about the warning. He has merely identified the wrong planner. The government doesn’t control my crew. I do. I control the terms roof by roof, paycheck by paycheck, with a safety catalog I never open and an inspector who hasn’t visited since 2019.
The state is not planning Wesley’s fall. I’m planning the conditions under which he must choose it.
And you’re in the arrangement. You buy the house. You admire the clean roofline. You pay taxes that keep the trauma center open. You pay for the hospital after the body leaves my job site, then congratulate yourself on purchasing at a competitive price. Thank you for your business.
The same arithmetic travels well, so let’s move from Savannah to Pine Bluff. Marisol is a beam-house hand on the chromium line I own there. Different surface. Identical math.
She turns hides through vats of chromium III solution for 10 hours a shift. The chromium-resistant gloves cost $62 a pair. I stopped replacing them in January. The belt you’re wearing passed through hands like hers before it reached the shelf.
Marisol buys nitrile gloves herself: $8.99 for a box of 100 from the supply house on Olive Street. They last roughly 2 hours in the bath. After that, the chromium does what chromium does. By the third week her forearms blister. She wraps them in cling film from the break room and finishes the row.
The cling film is a kitchen expense. It comes out of a different line.
The chromium doesn’t care which line paid for it.
I want you to understand why I prefer the phrase “protective-equipment adjustment.” “A woman’s skin is blistering because I kept $62” makes people at the table lose their appetite, and I have a reputation for keeping dinner pleasant. So I use the clean term. Then I show you the skin anyway.
Marisol earns $14.80 an hour. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts regional production wages above $16. The tannery down Route 65 closed in 2023, and for one useful season the supply of beam-house hands was exactly what the model required: more bodies than bargaining power.
If Marisol turns 200 hides in a shift, the cost of protecting her forearms is $0.005 per hide.
Five-tenths of a cent.
That buys me the gloves, the barrier cream, and the clinic visit I don’t pay for. It also buys me the knowledge that the next hand will arrive already aware of the terms. A unit that understands its replaceability is a remarkably punctual unit.
Some vessels are made for common use. Marisol is common use. I’m telling you this for your own good.
The two operations are not separate moral events. Wesley’s fall is an externalized safety cost. Marisol’s blisters are an externalized maintenance cost. In both cases, I collect the yield and send the body’s invoice elsewhere. The county hospital pays for the roof. Marisol pays for the chromium. You pay for both through the public systems that make my low prices possible.
The structure is older than my companies. The first skylines were framed without nets. The first tanneries wrote skin into the cost of leather. Cato placed the old slave and the sickly slave beside the old wagon and the worn iron tools, because an estate manager should know when an instrument has become superfluous. The language has improved since then. The subtraction has not.
The modern word is “incentive.”
The older word was ownership.
The difference is that I don’t have to own the body to charge it for my margin.
“The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.” — Proverbs 22:7
Wesley borrows his living from the man who sets the wage. Marisol borrows her next meal from the paycheck that depends on her skin holding together. The title lender on Olive Street waits for the short month. I hold an interest in the entity behind the storefront through a position the filing doesn’t require me to name. The rich rule. The borrower serves. The harness stays in the catalog.
This is the system’s law: wherever the cost of protection can be moved from the owner’s ledger into a worker’s body, a hospital’s budget, a taxpayer’s account, or a community’s future, the incentive will move it. No villain is required. I’m simply better at listening to the price signal.
I have taught this arithmetic for 30 years at Warden University’s College of Business and Economics. My graduates call it risk allocation. They call it contractor flexibility. They call it market discipline. One of them may have priced your wage. Another may have written the insurance exclusion that denies your claim. They’re not copying me anymore. They’re improving the syllabus.
Roofing is among the deadliest occupations in America. The government’s latest count gives a fatality rate of 48.7 deaths per 100,000 roofers, most involving falls. I’ve run crews without a protection package for 11 years. I’ve lost one man.
That makes me fortunate.
Or it makes the incentive successful.
The county hospital absorbed $340,000 in uncompensated construction trauma last year from sites in my service area. Neither that figure nor Terrell’s $187,000 appears on my balance sheet. That’s why the balance sheet looks so healthy. The injury is real; it simply belongs to a different owner.
Marisol’s line opens at 5. The vats are warm. Wesley will finish at 4:30, collect his check, drive to the supply house, and return at 5:40 tomorrow. He will climb without a harness because $14.50 an hour is still the best offer he has received this year.
The folder containing the demand those wages would have generated is in a drawer. I haven’t opened it. The current quarter is strong, and I have 3 subdivisions to bid before the rains.
Your roof will last 30 years.
Wesley will last as long as the margin requires.
The incentive worked.
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.