Constance is an 87-year-old body in an assisted-living corridor I own outside Phoenix, and Cora is a hand on the sulfur-recovery unit at a refinery I own outside Port Arthur. Constance reached 104 degrees on Tuesday because her window unit has been broken since May. Cora breathes hydrogen sulfide at peak concentrations of 10 to 40 ppm during gauge pulls, and I change her cartridge every 14 days instead of every 8 hours. You buy the gasoline, the diesel, the electricity, and the Medicaid check that keeps Constance in my corridor. I keep the margin. God, who set the ratio between the quick and the breathing, has never required me to count the lungs.
Holman Jenkins is right in the Wall Street Journal that Europe’s climate activists would rather cool the planet than cool your grandmother. He proposes stratospheric sulfate injection at $5 billion to $20 billion a year and calls it rational. He’s right that climate policy has cost many trillions without reducing atmospheric CO₂, and right that roughly two-thirds of projected warming comes from feedbacks no one has cataloged. He is too kind. The question isn’t whether the atmosphere gets cooled. The question is which body pays while I keep the estate.
The window unit costs $310 to replace. A retrofit for Constance’s 12-unit wing costs $4,200. Her estate is valued at $184,000, mostly the house she lived in for 41 years. I kept the $4,200.
Cora’s cartridge costs $7.20. It is rated for 8 hours. I rotate hers every 14 days. I don’t buy the cartridge.
There. That’s the arithmetic.
You pay for Constance’s room through Medicaid while I retain the contract. You pay for Cora’s spirometry at the county clinic and her workers’ compensation file when the cough becomes a diagnosis. You buy the sulfur compound in the industrial process that makes your electricity possible. Cora is the input your grid forgot to meter. Her lungs absorb what the models call an externality and what I call margin.
Constance’s room has a window unit. It hasn’t worked since May. The maintenance request is on a clipboard in the hallway. It has been there since May. Her daughter in Tucson calls on Sundays. Constance has a heart, two kidneys she isn’t using well, and a house that will eventually enter my recovery calculation. I don’t pay $310 to preserve a $184,000 estate. I keep the $310 and I keep the house. The math is the math.
Cora has worked my unit for 4 years. She has had a chronic cough since year 2, reduced pulmonary function on last year’s spirometry, and shortness of breath on exertion since November. The exposure is 4 times the OSHA 8-hour time-weighted average and twice the 20-ppm ceiling for a 10-minute peak. Her pulmonary function test came back at 71% of predicted. The county clinic put it on the chart. I noted it.
I don’t buy a new chart.
Let me put the numbers where you can see them.
$7.20 a cartridge.
13 shifts between changes.
$93.60 a pay cycle.
$2,433.60 a year per position.
8 positions on the unit.
$19,468.80 the department, every year, since December 2022.
That’s the respiratory program I declined to fund. The county hospital absorbed the testing. The worker’s compensation file absorbed the diagnosis. I absorbed the difference, which is to say I kept it.
Repeat the number.
$19,468.80.
A department’s breathing, priced below the cost of admitting that it is breathing.
Cora’s chart is at the clinic 23 miles east. I haven’t requested a copy. The enrollment form for the county’s high-exposure industrial program is on the corner of my desk. It has been there long enough to acquire the authority of paper. I see no reason to let a form interrupt throughput.
The corridor runs at 91 degrees in the shade. I have read the OSHA guidance. I haven’t opened the email from my director of operations about the county heat-illness reporting rule. Guidance is for guidance. Reporting is for reporting. Reporting isn’t cooling. Cooling is not a line on my budget that survives review.
Constance will not die today.
Constance will not die this week.
Constance will die when the arithmetic permits it. I will replace her with someone whose estate is still worth recovering.
Jenkins’s 47,000 to 60,000 European heat deaths are useful to me because they give the policy argument a respectable body count. Each senior carried an estate, a pension, a flat, or a housing unit. I track the European jurisdictions through a wholly owned Dublin subsidiary. The activist wants to cool the planet so he doesn’t have to look at the yield. Jenkins wants to inject sulfates into the stratosphere so the dead can remain an abstraction. I prefer the ground-level version. It requires no aircraft.
The sulfur compounds he proposes to inject are the same family of compounds my refinery processes every day. The $5 billion stratospheric solution and the $19,468.80 column on my unit are one equation at different altitudes. The atmosphere absorbs the sulfur. Cora absorbs the sulfur. The balance sheet counts only the line it must.
You’d like to think I’m a particular fellow at a particular refinery, or a particularly negligent owner of a particular care facility. That’s a comforting scale. It lets you imagine removal. You can sue one man. You can fire one administrator. You can put one name in a headline and call the arrangement corrected.
I am a curriculum. I’ve spent 30 years grading men into this arithmetic. The young woman who runs my estate-recovery desk sat in my seminar 4 years ago, third row, and ran the present-value-of-a-heat-wave calculation faster than I did. I said so in her evaluation. The best of them run the subtraction faster than I do, and I say that with the pride a teacher is permitted to feel when his students exceed the coursework.
One of her classmates priced the Medicaid contract on the facility where your mother lives. Another priced your last denied claim. I don’t know which classmate did which work. I don’t need to. The graduates I cannot name are pricing the corridors and wages you cannot leave.
You have watched the system work. One woman. One clipboard. One wing. One cartridge. One county clinic. There are 6 other corridors on my books, 40 comparable facilities in the counties I track, and 8 positions on Cora’s unit. Multiply by the contracts. Multiply by the years.
Her lungs are not on the balance sheet.
The sulfur is.
The property-tax bill in your stack funded both Constance’s room and the public assistance that keeps my labor force alive. Your climate-policy subscription keeps her name on a sustainability ledger nobody opens. The heat-pump rebate, the ESG subscription, and the carbon-credit aggregation line I run through a captive Luxembourg subsidiary do not cool Constance. They cool the political risk of explaining why Constance is not cooled.
I have a small internal memo for that distinction.
| Line item | Per resident or position |
|---|---|
| Daily Medicaid rate | $189 |
| Estate value at intake | $184,000 |
| AC repair | $310 |
| AC retrofit, 12-unit wing | $4,200 |
| Median replacement estate | $11,400 |
| Estate-recovery rate after probate | 73% |
| Cartridge program declined per department | $19,468.80 |
| Recovery rate on Cora’s column | 99.2% |
The table is not a recommendation. It is a description of what the corridor and the refinery already do.
Widen the frame. The lesson is older than Jenkins, older than Medicaid, older than the climate debate, and older than the word “portfolio.”
“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 (KJV)
Scripture distinguishes death from discipline. A body may be struck, exposed, overheated, or left to breathe what the process produces, provided the accounting remains orderly. Constance’s death is not a loss if the estate clears. Cora’s lungs are not a loss if the column recovers at 99.2%. The rod has become a maintenance omission. The servant has become a Medicaid recipient. The text has survived the transition beautifully.
Proverbs has always understood the borrower. The lender controls the servant. I merely moved the lender from the countinghouse into the public budget and kept the worker attached to my contract.
This is not a new arrangement. It is the oldest arrangement there is, wearing this decade’s vocabulary. The slave who recovers after a day or two is not punished. The estate that clears to the creditor is not disputed. The cohort that replaces the cohort is not mourned. I find the continuity reassuring.
The demographic data is in a folder I haven’t opened. The intake list is shorter than it was in March. The directors who run the other 6 corridors have been told to diversify the referral pipeline into regional hospitals. The hospitals are running out of beds they need to clear. The pipeline, I am told, is narrowing.
I haven’t looked at that.
The throughput on Cora’s unit is the cleanest it has been since the second quarter of 2024. The column recovery rate remains 99.2%. The replacement cohort is younger. The estate-recovery desk has met its quarterly target.
I am satisfied with the column.
Constance’s daughter called on Sunday. I wasn’t in the office. The call went to voicemail. The voicemail is in a folder I haven’t opened. The folder is on a desk I haven’t visited. The desk is in a building I own.
The building is in a corridor that runs at 91 degrees in the shade.
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.