The hero of capitalism stands at a pour bench I own outside Ironton, Ohio. His name is Lyle. He is a pourer, 44, and the heat at his station runs 115°F at chest height because the heat shield I didn’t install costs $2,400 and the $2,400 is mine.
God gives the brass its heat. I give the heat its owner.
The 3/4-inch elbow above your head came off his line this week. You haven’t looked at it. It feeds the sprinkler in your ceiling. Every fitting your fire code requires carries my margin and the silica in his lungs, cast in the same pour. The fitting weighs 4 ounces. It holds water against fire. It costs nothing you’ve ever been asked to see. It costs Lyle everything he can still close his hand around.
Frank Miniter writes in Fox News that Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations turns 250 this year. He says capitalism needs heroes. He proposes Edison, Mike Rowe, Palmer Luckey. He is welcome to them. I am the shopkeeper he’s looking for. Let me show you what the arithmetic looks like when the hero isn’t in the photograph.
Lyle earns $14.50 an hour. He pours 180 fittings in an 8-hour shift. At wholesale, each elbow clears $3.50. After brass, energy, sand, and Lyle’s own wage, I keep $1.26 per fitting. $59,000 a year from one station. Before I’ve paid for the building.
Now the respirator.
$45 for the half-face unit. $8 a month in cartridges. $141 a year. I run 36 stations. $5,076. The price of 36 men breathing.
Per fitting: $0.003.
Read that number twice. Three-tenths of a cent. That is the price of Lyle’s lungs past 55, measured in the only unit I have ever trusted. I keep $1.26. I don’t spend $0.003.
The fitting holds. The sprinkler opens when it’s told. Lyle’s hands don’t close the way they did at 30.
Daryl is Lyle’s neighbor on the shakeout — same building, same sand, same $0.003 I didn’t spend. He is 38. His pulmonologist used the word “early.” Early is the distance between the diagnosis and the line item, which is to say it is 5 years of clean quarterly reports before the law requires me to look at what I already know.
I have not yet been required to look. I am content to wait.
Widen the frame. The picker room is older than the foundry. The picker room is the only chapter Adam Smith wrote that he declined to audit.
Trina is a back in the picker room of the carpet mill I own outside Dalton, Georgia. She is 41. The picker opens the bale, shakes the cotton clean, and throws what it shakes straight at Trina. The picker has always thrown what it shakes straight at Trina. I have not slowed the picker. I will not slow the picker.
The broadloom on your floor — the 12-foot roll you bought last quarter for $1.79 the square foot — came off her station. The cotton enters her room at roughly a ton an hour. The picker strips it of leaf and stem, and the air settles at well over 2 mg per cubic meter. The OSHA permissible exposure limit for cotton dust is 0.2 mg per cubic meter. Ten times the limit. Twelve times on a humid Tuesday.
For her share of every yard of finished carpet I keep about a third of a cent. The local exhaust I declined to install would have held her room under the limit. $13 a week for the respirator. I don’t issue it.
A third of a cent. A woman’s lungs for that.
Marina is Trina 3,000 miles south, on the same cotton and the same picker, outside Laredo. The capex queue does not pause at the inspection station. The abatement queue does not pause at the inspection station. Marina is the abatement I declined, with a passport.
“Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?”
That is Romans 9:21. Paul was writing about vessels. He was not writing about lungs. The verse does not distinguish. The picker room has been quoting the verse for 250 years; the picker room just calls the potter the Invisible Hand, or the Market, or Smith.
I am not unusual. I am a curriculum.
I have taught cost optimization at Warden University for 26 years. My textbook, Calibrated Deprivation, ninth edition, chapter 7, uses a brass foundry as its case study. The finding: respiratory protection is a discretionary expense with a negative return on per-unit margin. 214 business schools assign it. If you have sat through a semester of managerial accounting, you have already read the number I didn’t spend on Lyle.
My best student is Carla. She is 29. She runs a brass operation in Gadsden, Alabama — 48 stations, no heat shields, no respirators, a margin I would frame if I had the wall space. She told me last quarter her cost-per-hand is $0.0019 under mine. I told her I had never been prouder.
She will teach the generation after her. She already runs the subtraction faster than I do.
I am not new. I am the oldest arrangement there is, wearing this decade’s vocabulary. Smith wrote the lecture in 1776; he declined the tour of the pin factory he so admired, and the pin factory was already a carpet mill, and the carpet mill was already a picker room, and the picker room was already a back. I have been grading the papers ever since.
The annual report will read $0.00 for respiratory protection on the pour floor. That is not an error. That is the number. The county issued 42% more building permits last year. Every permit requires fittings. The orders are up. I have not calculated the number of additional pour shifts the growth requires. The number belongs to the health department, or the county, or nobody. It is not a line item I recognize.
I have no complaints this quarter.
Trina’s replacement is on the morning bus from Calhoun. The bus arrives at 5:15. I have priced her hours. I have not learned her name.
The sun comes up over the Ohio. The pour floor is already hot before it reaches the light. The line runs. The fittings ship.
The picker room opens tomorrow at 5:30.
The picker room has always opened at 5:30.
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.