The Two-Thirds Is Mine. The Sheet Is Robin's.

Robin is a shoulder on the tempering line I own outside Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She stands at the 3-o’clock station of a horizontal tempering oven and feeds 60-pound sheets of float glass into the front of a furnace that runs at 1,120°F and pushes them out the back, 38 seconds later, as tempered glass that becomes the side window in your car, the shower door at the hotel you stayed at last month for your cousin’s wedding, and the table top at the diner near your office. She has loaded 1,847,210 sheets for me over 8 years. Her gloves are cotton. Cotton chars against radiant heat in 9 seconds; the heat-rated gauntlets that would survive the shift cost $44 a pair. She replaces the cotton from the Wal-Mart in Mechanicsburg. The Lord made the kiln to char the cotton. The gauntlets are hers. The 4 cents a sheet I keep by not issuing them is mine.

She herniated a disc at L4-L5 in her seventh year on the line. The orthopedist in Camp Hill put her on light duty twice. The first time I moved her to the cold end for 11 days. The second time I let her go for 19 days on workers’ comp, which the carrier paid at 66.66% of her average weekly wage. The light-duty reassignment cost me $612 in lost production. The 19 days cost me $0 because the carrier paid. The lightest is the 19 days.

The 66.66% didn’t include the $1.85 a shift she would have been buying gauntlets with. It covered the cost of a heating pad she bought at CVS for $14.99. The CVS is on her route to the line. The heating pad is hers. The 66.66% is hers. The 33.34% I kept is mine.

Read the next figure out loud.

The orthopedist billed her $1,440 for the MRI that diagnosed the herniation. She’s paying the orthopedist $80 a month on a payment plan. The payment plan will run 24 months if she doesn’t miss a payment.

The 24 months is on her kitchen counter in a pink folder. The folder is hers. The 80 a month is hers.

Here.

The 4 cents a sheet I keep by not issuing gauntlets and by not installing the lift-assist, across 1,847,210 sheets over 8 years, is $73,888.40 of margin I haven’t spent on her hands. I’ve spent $8,400 on the conference room chair I sit in when I tour the plant twice a year. The chair is leather. The leather came off a cow. The cow is not on my ledger. The chair is in the conference room. The room is on the second floor. The second floor overlooks the line. The line runs below the room where the chair sits.

The lift-assist that would have prevented the herniation costs $4,200. I haven’t picked it up. It’s been at the manufacturer’s warehouse in Lansing, Michigan, since the spring of 2022. The 4 cents a sheet since the spring of 2022 is $14,624. The $14,624 is on my books. The books are in my study. The study is in the house I built on the ridge above the plant. The ridge overlooks the line. I can see the line from the kitchen window when I rinse my coffee cup at 5:14 in the morning.

I am the two-thirds. I’ve been the two-thirds since the spring of 1996, when my plant manager proposed the first lift-assist and I declined it. The two-thirds is mine.

Several of you forwarded Salmon’s piece in the National Review this week. He writes that if Iowa’s Amendment 1 passes in November, 17 states will have bound their legislatures behind a two-thirds vote on any new or higher income or corporate tax. He reports that Iowa’s top rate has fallen from nearly 9% in 2018 to a 3.8% flat tax while Missouri and Nebraska phase down toward 4.5% and 4%, and that state spending has still grown 18% and sits $620 million above its pre-pandemic trend. He closes on Marshall’s 1819 line, that the power to tax involves the power to destroy. He’s correct about the economics. He’s asking the wrong taxpayer.

The mechanism is the only reason I care about a ballot in a state where I own nothing. Iowa administers its own workplace-safety office. That office is funded by an appropriation, and an appropriation is a spending decision. Under Amendment 1 a spending decision that has to grow to stay in place needs two-thirds. An inspector’s salary has to grow to keep pace with inflation. A laboratory has to replace its equipment. Two-thirds of a legislature has never been able to find two-thirds of anything. Flat is a cut, given enough years. I have never once needed a legislator to vote against my factory. I have only ever needed them to be unable to vote for it.

The amendment does not defund the inspectorate. It retires the possibility that the inspectorate ever catches up.

That is not a loophole. That is the design.

And the design is not confined to my glass line. There is a foam factory I own outside Tupelo, Mississippi. Odessa is a hand on the hot-wire cut line there. She has cut 214,000 mattress cores for me in 6 years. She earns $16.85 an hour. The foam is 39 hours off the mixer head, and at 39 hours fresh polyurethane still gives off the isocyanate that made her chest lock in February. She reported it to the nurse. The nurse reported it to the plant. The plant reported it to me. I made a note. The note is in a folder. The folder is in a cabinet I have never opened. The mattress in your guest room is hers. She has bought her own respirator cartridges since 2022. The plant store charges her $23.40. I have never issued one. An industrial hygienist I did not hire quoted me $28,900 for a downdraft table and a local exhaust arm at her station. Issuing cartridges and running spirometry for the 118 people on the two foam lines comes to $41,700 a year. I decline both.

I spent $212,000 last year on association dues and the retainer that keeps the phrase job creators alive in the air in Jackson. That $212,000 returns me, conservatively, nine times its cost in the first year the tax it prevents never comes due. The booth returns me nothing except a quieter floor and a report I would have to file. $41,700 is a rounding error against my quarter. Guess which one I bought.

God gave her a chest. I give her 10 hours.

Bernice Whitfield is my EHS coordinator at the Tupelo plant. She writes the exposure assessments. She signs them. She has never filed one, because the forms that would reach the state are the forms that would reach the booth, and the booth costs $28,900. She is 41 years old. She has been with me 9 years. She is, by every measure the law offers her, the safest woman in that building, because she is the one who documents that nobody is hurt. Last month she asked me for the cartridge rotation. I told her the plant store carries them.

Protection is what the amendment actually sells, and protection is always protection of something against something, and the question is never the noun. It is the something.

The bill does not mention tempered glass. It does not mention L4-L5. It does not mention a woman in Tupelo, and I do not hold that against the drafters, because a bill that mentions everything is a bill that mentions me.

Widen the frame past my plants, because this lesson is not really about my plants. A supermajority threshold is not an economic instrument. It is an assignment of fear. It decides which complaints are allowed to become expensive and which complaints are filed, answered, and closed inside the building where they started. 17 states have now made that assignment. I do not keep a list. My lobbyist keeps a list, and he updates it on Mondays, and he is very good.

The system Salmon is asking the voters of Iowa to install in their constitution, I have been running without a constitution. For 30 years I have graded men into the arithmetic you are reading. They sit in the firms that set your wage. They run the procurement at the hospital where your sister had her knee replaced. They price the contract that picks the cheapest laundry. They run the subtraction faster than I do and they are my alumni. The best of them sits on the board of the National Association of Manufacturers and his name is in the trade press and you have not read about him. He was the valedictorian of my seminar in the spring of 2011. He keeps a copy of Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization on his office shelf behind a sheet of glass that came off a different line. The shelf is on his office wall. The wall is in Cleveland. The alumni are not the exception. The alumni are the curriculum. The curriculum is the system.

The system is older than the amendment. Listen.

Hear this word, ye kine of Bashan, that are in the mountain of Samaria, which oppress the poor, which crush the needy, which say unto their masters, Bring, and let us drink.

Amos said it to the well-fed women of a capital city eight centuries before the first inspector walked my line. He said it and meant it for the women who said Bring to their masters and let us drink. I am the master. I am the kine. I drink. The 4 cents a sheet is the drink. The $7,392 a year I save on gauntlets across 14 loaders is the drink. The $73,888.40 is the drink.

Amos had an audience. I have a market.

The 17 states Salmon names have written their refusal into a constitution. I have written mine into a P&L. The state writes the amendment and the legislature cannot raise the tax. I write the line speed and the loader cannot ask for the lift. The amendment requires two-thirds. The lift requires one. The one is mine. The two-thirds is mine.

Robin earns $18.40 an hour. She works 10-hour shifts. The lift-assist would have prevented the herniation. The gauntlets would cost $44 a pair, replaced monthly. Across 14 loaders that is $7,392 a year of cost I would rather not incur.

Robin’s disc is at L4-L5. The orthopedist is in Camp Hill. The MRI is paid at $80 a month. The heating pad is at CVS. The gauntlets are at the Wal-Mart in Mechanicsburg, $44 a pair, behind the register by the fishing tackle. The lift-assist is at the manufacturer’s warehouse in Lansing, Michigan, $4,200, freight included. It has been there since the spring of 2022.

I’m told the auditor general of Pennsylvania will at some point have a problem with my line. I have not returned the call. The Q3 OSHA log has not been opened by me. The log is on Robin’s station.

The vote is in November. Her shift is Monday. Those are the only two calendars I keep.

The next loader is in the parking lot. The next loader is 23. The next loader doesn’t have a pink folder on her counter yet. She will. The folder won’t be on my P&L.

The kiln runs. The line runs. The 4 cents a sheet is mine.

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.