Instead of treating human capital as a national resource the way David Starr Jordan and company first planned it, America’s new leaders applied Garrett Hardin’s tragic-commons logic: If they were giving it away, people would go to school and, say, invent radical new theatrical art practices instead of building bombs like they were supposed to. With education enclosed, on the other hand, the market could properly value it and ensure its best use. Students began to think of themselves in the same terms, as a walking, talking set of investments; in a bifurcated world, they couldn’t afford not to. Silicon Valley employers, meanwhile, used their two-track labor force to keep unions out of the regional industry. For the highly waged, firms introduced all sorts of fun perks, from team getaways to gourmet meals and free beer. National Semiconductor invested millions of dollars in a 14-acre “Employee Recreation Park.”31 Referral bonuses encouraged workers to talk up their firms to their friends. Bosses eschewed formal hierarchy and opened up the floor plan. Fighting alienation at work by making the workplace more fun, more personal, was a flexible way to attract workers and keep labor organizers at bay—these freebies were easier to withdraw in lean times, such as the early ’80s downturn, which briefly reached the Valley in ’82, than wages and promised benefits. “The Pentagon is an active collaborator in union-busting,” wrote scholars Ann Markusen and Joel Yudken at the time, and the state encouraged investment in non-union areas.32 Three of the top four counties for prime DOD contracts at the end of Reagan’s first term were in California, including Santa Clara at number 3.33 The county nabbed 3 percent of all DOD contracts in 1980, five times its fair share by population.34 Silicon Valley became a labor-relations model, and the CEOs became national figures. “Organization in a high growth company is people oriented,” the ASK Computer Systems founder and CEO, Sandra Kurtzig, explained to a joint congressional committee in 1984. “The company functions as a family. It takes care of employees who perform, but nonperformers are unwelcome and unwanted. And we’re fortunate that we don’t have labor unions in Silicon Valley because of the orientation toward people.”35 What a strange family.