Mireille is a 58-year-old press body at the brake-caliper plant I own outside Rennes, and I want Marine Le Pen elected because lowering France’s retirement age from 62 to 60 gives me a clean date to replace her. You pay for the brake calipers on your car; I keep $0.006 a caliper because I removed the $31 sheet-metal guard that kept her fingers out of the stamping die. Joseph C. Sternberg’s “Don’t Assume Marine Le Pen Can Save France” in the Wall Street Journal says France’s fiscal model cannot continue, Le Pen may win next spring yet cannot repair France’s budget paralysis, and her program includes lowering the retirement age from 62 to 60. I don’t need France saved. I need the retirement age moved. I have a plant full of people who will be 60 on a Tuesday. God keep your brakes and bless the empty timetable.
Let me show you what the guard costs and what I keep. I’m telling you this for your own good. You don’t have to enjoy it. You do have to learn it, because the arithmetic doesn’t wait for you. “Press body” means a 58-year-old woman whose fingers I set near a stamping machine because her labor costs less than protection. The honest description interrupts lunch, so I use the cleaner term.
The sheet-metal guard that keeps her fingers out of the stamping die costs $31.
Without the guard, I keep $0.006 a caliper.
With the guard, I keep $0.
I could have tossed that margin in the scrap bin; I kept it.
Her right hand no longer closes.
I moved her to inspection, restarted the press, and admired the efficiency. The line missed nothing. The margin went straight to the books. I did not trouble the ledger with her hand.
Marguerite is Mireille with an earbud instead of a caliper: a 47-year-old line-filler at the wireless-earbud plant I own outside Rennes, and I keep her walking 11 miles home. Her 11-mile commute is the margin I keep. The candidate is thinking at the scale of an election. I think at the scale of a fare. You paid for the earbuds in your pocket with the work of her hands. The margin is mine, and I’m proud of it.
She stands through a 10-hour shift assembling earbuds. Her left ankle swells before the bridge. She has 11 miles left and no bus. Her shift runs 08:00 to 18:00. She reaches the bridge at 21:40. By dawn, the heels of her shoes are gone.
You may feel uneasy. I don’t blame you. Hard feelings make arithmetic harder, and I promise this will be brief. Put the ride beside the wage. The whole lesson is in the gap.
The 22:40 bus is not funded. I take a late-bus charge from her pay anyway. She walks.
€1.40 a worker. That is the margin.
I don’t like paying the fare. I like keeping the margin.
At the diaper plant I own outside Tours, sanitation hand Sabine finishes after the last bus has gone. Same law, worse schedule: the road is longer, and the resin smell stays on her coat until morning. I assign her the road. Different product, identical math: I file the distance as efficiency.
Let the 2 plants share a column. Employer-State Substitution is the law: the state keeps the body alive and opens the road; I take the output; the worker pays the distance between them. The missing column is time.
Mireille is 58. At 60, the state starts paying her to stop producing. I get 2 more years of output and then a replacement at a lower rate. The reform I endorse is a firing schedule with benefits.
The useful question is not who wins. The useful question is who becomes cheaper when the promise moves.
Does a lower retirement age create output? No.
Does it remove a worker from output? Yes.
Who carries the difference between what the state promises and what the state can pay? The worker still on the line.
Don’t isolate me. I’m the Dean of Instruction. I taught for 30 years, grading accountants into this arithmetic. I put the rule in my managerial textbook: no hand gets a guard before the loss appears in the budget. The plant manager who removed Mireille’s guard learned it from me. He arrived anxious about the guard’s cost and left fluent in maintenance. By the end, he could keep a hand injury out of the capital request without costing anyone 1 minute.
I’m not unusual. I’m a curriculum. I’m in every copy. The best graduates run the subtraction faster than I do. I’m proud, as a teacher is when the lesson travels. My graduates set the hours on the line that made the brake calipers on your car; they didn’t need me for that part. Last month, one of my graduates cut the line wage until the people who made the earbuds couldn’t afford a pair. She found the floor faster than I would have. I’m proud of her. She now sets wages at firms whose bills you pay. She moved the line that sets yours.
A social contract isn’t a promise between persons. It’s a schedule by which current labor is made to finance the retirement of people who have stopped producing. The employer receives the years of output before the promise begins. The state receives the obligation after it begins. The employer isn’t on either side of the promise. The employer owns the interval. That is the law beneath the election.
“And as ye go, from house to house, when ye have made the dinner ready, say, The labourer is worthy of his hire.”
— Luke 10:7 (KJV)
The verse is old. The arrangement is older. It hands the labourer a sentence to say as he goes: The labourer is worthy of his hire. I have always read “his hire” as the wage and nothing more. Everything after it—rest, medicine, a pension—is maintenance. Maintenance is waste when the body can be made to work longer or replaced more cheaply. A retirement age lowered to 60 is not a rescue plan. It is a schedule. The promise supplies a signature.
By spring, I’ll replace the night supervisor with a camera and a dashboard. The dashboard will count every worker leaving after dark. I’ll leave the appeals screen to the controller. It is a tidy system.
The guard is gone. The hand is out of the ledger. When the contribution rate rises to cover the pension, the calipers cost more and fewer of them move off the line. The wage cut leaves the people who make the earbuds unable to afford a pair. The demand goes somewhere. I have not examined where. The export orders are full, and my morning is orderly.
Mireille reached 60 on a Tuesday. The state began paying her pension. I hired her replacement, removed Mireille’s locker, and ran the press. At the first bell, Marguerite is back at my gate. Thank you for buying the brake calipers. Please enjoy the savings.
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.