“The case of Gérard Depardieu continues to agitate France”, Dalrymple says here. He argues against a recent opinion piece in Libération that says… well, you know what it says.
[I]t would require immense, indeed totalitarian, political power to decide what are both ‘the most basic needs of existence’ and an acceptable level of capital accumulation (I leave aside entirely the practical probability that setting such parameters would inhibit prosperity). To be just in the sense that the author means, the most basic human needs and acceptable levels of capital accumulation would have to be identical throughout the world, for if they were different in different societies they would merely set up new injustices, between rather than within societies. Without realising it, then, she is arguing not so much for world government as for world dictatorship.