Odessa is a body at the indigo line in the denim mill I own outside Carnesville, Georgia. She’s 53. Her hands have been blue to the wrist for 11 years, the dye that doesn’t come off, and she doesn’t come off either, because the shift is mine to write and the vat is mine to run. My margin on the pair is $0.41. The duty I drove a Chrysler to Washington to write is $4.40. You paid it. The duty was sold to you as the iron — the rail, the foundry, the muscle of the new republic. Mine buys a $0.29 latex glove. I haven’t bought Odessa the glove. The $4.40 is mine. The $0.29 is hers. The difference lines me. Welcome to the protection. God willing, the line runs on time.
Mr. Langer writes in the Wall Street Journal this morning that Vice President Vance has gotten Alexander Hamilton wrong. Langer’s case is that the Jefferson-Madison reading is the truer American one, that the economy is the quiet doing of dispersed households and free people, and that centralized industrial power is the threat. He’s describing me in his sleep. The Hamilton he fears is the one who stood at the dock and pronounced the tariff. I stand at the vat and pronounce the glove. His theory of dispersion is the theory of how my $4.40 stays mine and her $0.29 stays unbought. He’s welcome to his churches. I’ll keep the border.
Vance says the Christian guardrails are gone and that Hamiltonian state-direction will replace them. Langer says the markets don’t need the Christian guardrails. Liberty. Property. Contracts. They are arguing about the leash. I am the dog that was on the leash. The leash broke in ‘83, when the local union at the Warren plant went under, and I have been off it for 42 years. The tariff Vance praises is not a leash coming back. It is the permit.
“For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.” — 2 Thessalonians 3:10
The verse was written for the man at the threshold. The verse doesn’t say who feeds him. It doesn’t ask who pays for the indigo, or for the gloves, or for the rail, or for the foundry. It asks only that he eat by his hand and not by another’s. Odessa eats by her hand. The hand is blue to the wrist. The glove would have cost me $0.29. I haven’t spent it. The meal the verse promised is the meal I denied.
Let me put her numbers where you can see them. Her wage is $11.62 an hour. The glove that would keep the dye off her hands costs $0.29 a pair. She uses three pairs a week. That’s $4.35 a month. The duty I keep off her line is $87,120 a month, across 19,800 pairs. The glove is 0.005% of the duty. Her hands are 99.995% of what subsidizes my $0.41 a pair. Read that number twice. The $0.29. The $0.29.
Watch.
Move 600 miles and change the product. The arithmetic travels. Lupe is a shoulder on the cut-off saw at the steel-tube mill I own outside Warren, Ohio. She’s 47. The 1.5-inch square tubing she cut at 6:14 this morning is in the bunk-bed ladder your son climbs at 7:30 tonight. She earns $19.40 an hour. Her station cuts 38,000 linear feet of tubing on a Tuesday shift. My cost per foot, before the tariff, is $0.61. My competitor’s landed cost from Incheon, after the 25% Section 232, is $0.84. I sell at $0.84 minus my $0.014. The arbitrage on Lupe’s shift is $532. The arbitrage on Lupe’s year is $138,416. The arbitrage is mine. The arbitrage is the entire business.
$0.014 a foot. $138,416 a year. That sum would have bought the $11,400 furnace re-line twelve times over. It would have bought Lupe the $4.20-an-hour raise the Vance administration told the steelworkers the tariff would fund. It would have bought her a rotator-cuff repair I will not pay for, in the same clause I will not pay for the respirator. Tossing them costs me nothing. Tossing them is the whole exercise.
Lupe clocks in at 5:46 a.m. The coke-side fumes hang where the re-line would have pulled them. Her right shoulder has been the descending note since ‘21. I keep the $11,400. Her shoulder is the cost the verse does not price. I am not pricing it either. I am pricing $0.014 a foot.
Mireya is a hand on the dock at the bed-frame plant I own outside Phenix City, Alabama. She earns $16.80 an hour welding what Lupe cuts. The margin is the margin. Her welder mask is the one I declined to replace in March. The replacement mask costs $48. I keep the $48. The frame ships. Your kid climbs it.
Three floors. 3 women. One arithmetic. The tariff’s the permit I don’t need. The verse is the leash I broke in ‘83. The $0.29 is Odessa’s. The $48 is Mireya’s. The $11,400 is Lupe’s. The $138,416 is mine. The bunk-bed ladder, the pair of jeans, the welded frame — yours.
I’m not the man to vote out. I’m a curriculum. 30 years I’ve graded young men into this arithmetic. My graduates sit on the desks where the $4.40 and the $0.014 and the $48 are moved. One of them priced your wage this morning. The best of them runs the subtraction faster than I do, and I say that with a teacher’s pride.
I’ve heard the tariff won’t always hold. I’ve heard the talks. The border, they say, will reopen, and the foreign denim’ll return at $0.80 a pair, and the mill I own will lose its $4.40 and her $0.41 and my $0.41. I haven’t priced what comes after. The vat’s open today. Odessa’s hands are blue. The $0.29’s unbought. I sleep at the rate the indigos let me.
The jeans you’re wearing came through a vat of hers, and the duty on them is mine, and the glove is hers, and she’s wearing the ungloved version. The economy Mr. Langer describes — the dispersed, free, family-built economy — is the economy I haven’t interfered with. I’ve interfered with Odessa. The rest of you I leave to your churches.
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.