Discrimination and Disparities

by Thomas Sowell

A division in which one woman gets a shilling and another three thousand shillings for an hour of work has no moral sense in it: it is just something that happens, and that ought not to happen. A child with an interesting face and pretty ways, and some talent for acting, may, by working for the films, earn a hundred times as much as its mother can earn by drudging at an ordinary trade.4 Here productivity is not simply missing, but implicitly repudiated, as a basis for income. The child movie star who is paid many times what her mother is paid is obviously being paid by someone who values her movie role more than anyone values her mother’s work. In short, she is being paid for productivity—as judged by whoever pays her, who in turn is paid by vast numbers of other people, who pay for the enjoyment they get from watching her in the movies. It is not “just something that happens” and there is no basis on which a third-party observer can say that this voluntary transaction is something “that ought not to happen”—that his personal opinion should override other people’s right to do as they choose with their own money or their own time.