Michael Barone‘s latest Washington Examiner article explores U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s approach to the Walmart sex discrimination lawsuit. The high court’s majority rejected the suit, but Ginsburg’s dissent troubles Barone.

There was no disagreement that Walmart’s management practices are “a system of delegated discretion.” Walmart store managers, as Justice Antonin Scalia explained in his majority opinion, have considerable discretion in deciding whom to hire and whom to promote.

The company, which employs some 1.4 million people in this country, is proud that it tends to promote from within, and it evidently holds its managers responsible for results that it famously monitors extremely closely.

It is hardly necessary to add that this formula has been successful. Walmart is enormously profitable. And I don’t think I’m the only one who has found Walmart greeters and salespeople to be friendly and helpful every time I’ve shopped there.

But this is not a fair way to run a business, Ginsburg said, because women hold 70 percent of the company’s hourly jobs but only 33 percent of its management positions. Women are paid less on average than men in every region, and the salary gap between men and women widens over the years.

All of which provides, Ginsburg concluded, an “inference of discrimination.” The fact that many women these days freely choose less demanding work in return for more family and free time surely couldn’t have anything to do with it.

The conclusion I draw is that Ginsburg thinks the only fair way to run a large organization is the way government runs civil service.

All jobs should be numerically classified to eliminate “arbitrary and subjective criteria.” Promotions should be determined by written tests or seniority, not by managers choosing “on the basis of their own subjective interpretations.”

Managers should understand that they will face harsh scrutiny if they don’t hire and promote equal numbers of men and women and pay them all the same. Better just to figure out how to make your gender quotas and avoid any trouble.

Of course anyone with experience in the real world can tell you that an organization run this way wouldn’t be as efficient as Walmart. It wouldn’t do as good a job of satisfying consumers’ wants. Its employees would probably not be as friendly and helpful.