Dear Chairman,

Duane is a hand on my evisceration line outside Berryville, Arkansas. 58 years old. Fourteen of them at the transfer point, where the birds come off the hook and the line has a second to decide whether it’s taking him or the chicken. Stephen Moore reports in Fox News that the proposed merger of Covetrus and MWI Animal Health is pro-competitive, will lower prices for veterinarians, and is exactly the deal the new FTC under Chairman Ferguson should bless. The S&P is at a record. Pet parents are relieved. The man writing the column gets to say “bless it.” I get the hand.

I used to run 2 plants, Hixson’s across the river and mine. Between them, 412 bodies on the line. Now I run one, at 212 birds a minute, and the merged line needs 214. I let go 198. You buy the bird 11 cents cheaper and call that competition. God keep the line at 212.

The 198 got cheaper by everything they had.

Now widen the frame. Pull up a chair, because this is where your 11 cents landed.

Move 600 miles north to my feed mill outside Cairo, Illinois, where Bobbie is a body on the bag-off stack. She is 41. She has spent 11 years lifting 50-pound sacks off the conveyor, setting them on the pallet, and stacking 2,400 across an 8-hour shift. Her station has no safety clamp. The clamp costs $1,400. I keep the $1,400.

The clamp is the piece of hardware that keeps Bobbie’s right hand from slipping when she sets the sack down. Without it, the sack lands. Without it, Bobbie’s hand swells. Her hand has been swelling since March. The company doctor is on my letterhead. I haven’t asked him to look.

Bobbie’s feed goes to hog and poultry operations across 3 counties. The pork you bought this week was finished on feed that left her pallet. The chicken on your plate last Sunday was finished on feed that left her pallet. Bobbie is the stack you ate.

God keep the schedule intact.

Now take a different station at the same mill. Theron is a body on the pelleting line. He is 28. He has spent 4 years on second shift, standing at the die where steam-pressed mash is forced through holes and the pellets fall. The steam comes off at 312°F. The vent above his station is cracked. The replacement costs $2,100. I keep the $2,100.

The vent has been cracked since January. Theron’s forearms have been blistering since January.

Theron is the same arithmetic, one rung hotter.

The consolidation Moore celebrates gives the merged entity power over its suppliers: the premix blenders, vitamin packagers, and trace-mineral houses. That power reaches my mill as $0.04 a ton.

I buy 28,400 tons a year.

$1,136.

Bobbie’s clamp costs $1,400. Theron’s vent costs $2,100. I don’t use the merger savings to buy either one. I use the savings to make both repairs look like choices. The spread stays clean because the bodies absorb the alternative.

The column tallies itself.

“That we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals; yea, and sell the refuse of the wheat.”
— Amos 8:6 (KJV)

Amos was pricing a different kind of body in a different kind of market. He had the right arithmetic and the wrong unit. The unit is Duane’s hand, Bobbie’s hand, Theron’s forearms, and the 198 people whose names I no longer employ. The price is the price.

My grandfather logged the same motion in his own hand. The SS account recorded children at 1.5 Reichsmarks a day, paid to the SS. The child received the ration. The camp’s term was Vernichtung durch Arbeit: destruction through work. The body was the input, the output was the byproduct, and disposal was the next production event.

I am not new. I am the oldest arrangement there is, wearing this decade’s vocabulary.

Return to Berryville. Plant B was run by Gwendolyn, 61, who could tie a shackle in the dark. She isn’t on the line anymore. Donté is, at $11 an hour, 11 years younger and two employers later, with her hands and none of her leverage. The assist that would swing the bird to Duane instead of making him reach costs $4,700 a station. There are 14 stations. I keep the $4,700 at every one.

The chicken is 11 cents cheaper.

My hands are cheaper by the assist.

That’s the whole synergy, if you want it in one lesson.

I kept the trinket.

I am not unusual. I am a curriculum. I spent 9 years on the editorial board of the Journal of Managerial Extraction. I taught the manager who priced the Covetrus-MWI merger at the consultancy advising the deal. I taught the manager who decided the post-merger integration would route $0.04 a ton downstream to mid-tier mill operators. I taught the manager who wrote the FTC filing arguing that the deal was pro-competitive. She sat in my seminar in the spring of 2019. She received an A.

She is currently pricing your dog’s frontline.

She doesn’t know Bobbie’s name. She has never walked my floor. She is correct not to.

At Berryville, the man who priced the 198 took my seminar in 2011. Chapter 9 says that a firm unable to adapt serves no one: not its employees, not its customers, not the American economy. The op-eds borrow the sentence now. He read it, and then he priced the bodies by the chapter.

The golden age is 30 years of lecturing, graduating, and counting. I say this with pride. My students arrive sentimental. By spring, the best ones see the subtraction before I do. One of them wrote the severance formula for the job you’re afraid of losing. One of them calculated your 11-cent bird. One of them decided 198 people were synergy.

The faculty remains employed.

What your letter doesn’t ask is where 14 years of Duane’s knees went when the line doubled. His county used to have 2 employers. Now it has 1, and it pays what I say. The bird is 11 cents cheaper on Main Street. The county is one employer lighter. I haven’t been to the closing. I haven’t read the severance letters. The demand for those hands goes somewhere I haven’t priced.

The market is efficient.

The bag-off stack will be 2,400 sacks lighter at 6 tonight. The clamp won’t have arrived. The vent above Theron’s die won’t have been replaced. The company doctor still won’t have been asked to look. Bobbie’s hand has been swelling since March. Theron’s forearms have been blistering since January. The merger will close in Q1.

I haven’t priced the clamp.

The quarterly number is what the spreadsheet calls intact. The pallet-jack battery is on my desk. The pallet-jack battery is mine to keep.

The hook at the transfer point still turns in Duane’s wrist. He’s 58. He’ll hold until the shoulder goes. The line ships at 4 tomorrow. The letter stays framed where he can’t see it. The quarter closes clean, and I’m pleased with it.

The hook doesn’t feel the difference.

Neither do I.

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.