The Cartridge Is in Nevada. The Carbon Stopped in California.

Fund wrote at the National Review that six billionaires left California ahead of Proposition 40 — a one-time 5% wealth tax on net worth above $1 billion — taking $536 billion, nearly 30% of aggregate billionaire wealth, out of the state’s tax base. He’s correct that the State is poorer for the exit. He hasn’t priced who was assembled out of the wealth before it moved.

I am the seventh billionaire. I didn’t go. Let me show you what your battery costs.

The cathode slurry at the cell plant I own outside Fremont runs on NMP — N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone. It bonds the lithium to the aluminum foil that sits inside the battery in your phone, the module in your laptop, the pack in your EV. CLP regulation classifies NMP as Category 1B reproductive toxicant. The protocol calls for supplied-air respirators with activated-carbon cartridges rated to 200 hours of continuous exposure. The carbon saturates at 200 hours. After that, the solvent passes through the filter and into the lungs of whoever is wearing it.

I run to 400.

The cartridges cost $47. The protocol says replace at 200 hours. I run to 400. That is one cartridge saved every 200 hours per hand, and there are six hands on the line, and 2,080 hours in a year. At the protocol interval I’d burn 62 cartridges. At mine, 31. The difference is 31 cartridges at $47 each.

$1,457 a year. That is $243 per hand per year. That is $0.94 a day per worker. A latte is $5.50.

The carbon in hour 201 doesn’t catch NMP. It passes the vapor — slowly at first, then all of it. Kerri has stood at this line for 3 years. The occupational health log I’m not required to keep would tell you what her mornings are like. I don’t keep it.

I could replace every cartridge at the protocol mark for $1,457 a year. I could install the closed-loop solvent-recovery upgrade — $38,000 upfront, captures the 15% of vapor the roof stack vents into the parking lot where Kerri parks. I could do both for less than the catering at the electrode-optimization conference where my paper on yield won an award. The paper is on yield. The award sits in my office in Richmond. Kerri doesn’t know about the award. She knows about the mornings.

Here’s where most people get it wrong. They think the question is whether I could afford to fix this. I can. I choose not to. The question they should be asking is what sustains the choice. Kerri has no exit. Every woman on the coating line needs the shift and the Medicaid and the food stamps that hold her between the paychecks I design. She qualifies for both because the wage is calibrated to produce eligibility. You pay for her maintenance. I keep the output. That’s not a subsidy. That’s a labor architecture. I have kept the yield of the plantation model and externalized the maintenance onto the taxpayer, and the margin is exquisite. My grandfather paid three Reichsmarks a day for upkeep he could not avoid. I have arranged for you to pay it for him. That is progress.

I did not invent this arithmetic. I teach it. Warden University, 31 years. My graduates sit in the procurement offices that priced the battery you’re reading this on. One of them quoted the NMP-line labor rate to my exact specifications before you’d finished scanning the spec sheet. She got an A. She deserved it. I am not unusual. I am a curriculum. The question is not whether someone like me sits on your supply chain. It is how many of my students got there before you looked.

Now widen the frame. Fund’s column assumes the billionaires are a fixed pool whose capital the state can reach. The Fremont line makes the same assumption about women who will stand at a coating table and breathe saturated carbon for $14.80 an hour. Both assumptions are holding — for now. When the supply of either contracts, I adjust the interval.

“The lord of those servants came and reckoned with them. So he that had received five talents came and brought other five talents, saying, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me five talents: behold, I have gained beside them five talents more. His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.” — Matthew 25:20–21.

The talent is the margin. The faithful servant is me. Kerri is not in the parable. She is the talent. And talents travel.

Here is where the line moves.

Proposition 40 would have cost me 5% of my net worth, payable in March. The Bakersfield plant is mine. The land is mine. The cells are mine until they ship. The 240 hands on the third sub-line are mine contractually. A staffing agency in Visalia books them. That agency subcontracts to a labor broker in Tijuana. The broker sends the women. They report at 5:45 a.m. They clock out at 2:15 p.m. They are mine.

A quarterly cost-of-living raise of $1.85 an hour was in the binder. The binder is on a shelf in the Sparks office now. The plant runs 12.4 million cells a year. $496,000 in retained wages. The wealth tax I would have owed was a sum I will not print in your newspaper. I keep both.

One of the 240 is a woman named Tameka. She stacks 2,200 cylindrical cells a shift into the modules that go into the phone on your nightstand, the laptop in your bag, the EV in your driveway. She will stack 2,200 cells tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after, for 11 months. On the 12th month the cells will ship from Sparks.

Lourdes is a cell-assembly hand at the plant I am opening in Sparks, Nevada. She will run the same line with the same electrolyte on the same cells at $2.30 an hour less than Tameka’s rate, which was already $1.85 less than what the binder promised. The air conditioning will be absent. The staffing agency is the same Visalia agency. The labor broker is the same Tijuana broker. Lourdes does not know the binder exists. She does not know the raise was promised. She does not know the rung is there. I will not be asked.

“Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury. Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents. For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” — Matthew 25:27–30.

The lord reaps where he has not sown. I am the lord. The far country is Nevada. The talent is the margin. I will be made ruler over many things.

I have spent 30 years grading men into this arithmetic. The binders are the same binder. The Visalia agency is the same agency. The Sparks warehouse without air conditioning is the same warehouse without air conditioning. The best of my graduates run the relocation faster than I do, and I say that with a teacher’s pride. You will not quarantine me as one bad man in one bad plant. I am the median output of an entire profession, and I am its dean.

Tameka asked about the binder last April. I told her the relocation required a temporary pause on non-operational expenditures. The relocation did not require a pause on anything. The line speed is up 4% this quarter. The yield number is clean.

The cells leave California on Monday. The plant in Sparks opens Monday. Tameka stays in Bakersfield. The binder stays in Sparks. Kerri’s cartridge hit hour 341 at 3 a.m. The carbon stopped catching at 200.

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.