… is from page 189 of Steven Landsburg’s wonderful 1997 book, Fair Play:
Who are the big losers from discrimination? You might think it’s the black employees who are denied suitable positions. But it’s also the stockholders who are denied the services of those black employees….
When corporate managers indulge their personal tastes for Van Gogh oil paintings at a multimillion dollar cost to the stockholders, nobody has any trouble recognizing that the stockholders are being plundered. When those same managers indulge their personal tastes for racial discrimination at a multimillion dollar cost to the stockholders, the stockholders are victimized in a precisely analogous way.
