The Moratorium Has a Cost. It Isn't Mine.

Marla is a hand at the galvanizing kettle I own outside Cumberland, Maryland. The fume extraction hood costs $19,400. I declined it in 2021 and I will decline it this quarter. Her lungs are the ventilation plan. God gives the zinc its heat.

Noah Rothman reported this week in National Review that Senator Sanders has introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act — a moratorium on advanced AI, a halt to data center construction, the future of humanity held to the legislative calendar. He is very serious. I am also serious. I own the line that coats the structural steel for the buildings he wants to stop. The moratorium costs me nothing.

Let me put the numbers where you can see them.

The line runs molten zinc at 860°F through a dip tank, a withdrawal rack, a cooling stream. The steel goes into data centers. It goes into warehouses. It goes into the buildings your senator will debate while the kettle runs behind him. Marla feeds the steel through the bath. She stands 4 feet from the zinc for 10 hours. The OSHA PEL for zinc oxide fume is 5 mg/m³ over an 8-hour shift. My own safety consultant priced the recirculating hood at $19,400. I declined it. The cost of the hood, spread across the line’s annual tonnage: $0.11 per hundredweight of steel.

$0.11.

The margin on the line is $7.2 million a year. The hood pays for itself in 9 days. I have declined it for 1,461 days because the margin is better without it — and because $19,400 is what I spent on the parking lot expansion in April. You’ve parked on it. The hood is a rounding error I chose to keep.

The 14 hands on the line read the hood’s absence. $19,400 is a number I know. The kettle runs at 860°F with the fume rising into the open shop. The hood not being there is the sentence. Marla is the sentence.

Marla is 44. She started the kettle shift at 40. The OSHA 300 log for the line shows one entry this year — metal fume fever, 3 days restricted duty, one name. One entry. One name. One diagnosis that matches exactly what zinc oxide does to lungs that stand at an open bath without a hood, 10 hours a shift, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year. The denominator is 14. I won’t slow the lesson for the denominator.

She asked me once, through the shift supervisor, if she could move to the inspection station — same line, no kettle, $0.40 less an hour. Her daughter was in tenth grade. She wanted to be home when the girl finished homework. The inspection station was filled. I could have created one. $16,800 a year. I didn’t. She is at the kettle because the station doesn’t exist. The station doesn’t exist because $16,800 is mine.

Here is the principle the kettle is only an example of.

Your senator’s moratorium would pause the building of data centers. It would not pause the galvanizing kettle that coats the steel for those data centers. Regulation stops the construction permit. It does not stop the zinc bath. It does not stop the fume. It does not stop the 10-hour shift that precedes the construction — weeks before, months before, the length of a supply chain your senator has not traced to the kettle because the kettle is not in his bill.

Romans 9:21: “Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?”

The potter has had this right longer than the senator has held his office. The clay does not choose its temperature. I choose the bath. I choose the hood’s absence. I choose the $0.40 gap that keeps Marla at the kettle. The senator will debate the future of humanity. He will not debate the zinc oxide standard. One debate is about superintelligence. The other is about Thursday.

Marcus starts Monday. He is the 15th. He’ll learn the kettle. Marla will train him. She is very good at training new hands. She has had practice.

Now take a different industry, because the principle travels. Frankie is a reactor operator on the night shift at an epitaxial deposition facility I own outside Hillsboro, Oregon. The chamber he loads runs silane at 1,150°C. The silane detector the OSHA standard requires costs $8,500 a unit. I run 48 chambers. I haven’t ordered the detectors in 3 years. The purchase order I didn’t send is on my desk.

Your laptop has silicon in it. That silicon was finished in a chamber like Frankie’s.

Let me do the division the way I do it. The 48 detectors I never ordered cost $408,000 at retail. The facility processed 2.8 million wafers in the last quarter. The detector cost per wafer comes to $0.1457.

$0.1457. Look at the digits until they stop being money.

The backup ventilation caught the first leak in 2023. The second came through a cracked fitting in 2025 and was caught by a sensor on the floor below. My insurance broker calls it a manageable risk profile. Frankie calls it a cough that hasn’t left since January.

Read the next sentence twice. Frankie’s floor turns 343,000 wafers a year at $1.19 of margin each. The arithmetic of one shift comes to $408,170. The 48 detectors I did not order cost $408,000. One shift pays for the refused safety of all 48 chambers and leaves me $170. I spent the $170. I don’t remember on what.

Widen the frame. The facility has operated for 11 years. Frankie is the seventh reactor operator to hold the night shift. The first three lasted under 18 months each. I have misplaced the incident report on the fourth. The fifth quit. The sixth reports Tuesday. Frankie is the one currently scheduled.

When the cough reaches the point where Frankie can no longer load the chamber, the shift will be re-posted. The posting went out in 2023 and received 12 applications in 48 hours. There is no shortage of people who will stand at the chamber. There is only a shortage of people who have been told what the chamber costs.

The senator wants to ban the superintelligence. He wants to pause the data centers. The demand for my wafers would contract. The quarterly margin would compress. I would restaff the floor at a lower throughput. The cough would rest on a different body. The math does not stop because the policy changes. The math stops only when the margin goes to zero, and the margin will not go to zero because there is always another chip, another sensor, another device that needs the silicon my facility grows in a chamber that runs silane at 1,150°C in the dark.

The senator wants to debate civilization. I have chosen Thursday. The moratorium has a cost. It isn’t mine. The cost is Marla’s lungs and Frankie’s cough. The senator chose his debate. I chose mine. The senator will lose his vote. I will keep the kettle and the chamber. That is the arrangement. Scripture agrees.

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.