"...the chief connection between human rights and market fundamentalism is a missed connection: Precisely because the human rights revolution has focused so intently on state abuses and has, at its most ambitious, dedicated itself to establishing a floor for protection, it has failed to respond to — or even much recognize — neoliberalism’s obliteration of the ceiling on inequality.

Could a different form of human rights correct this mistake? I doubt it. This is not to contradict the moral significance and possibly even historical success of human rights when it comes to combating political repression and restraining excessive violence. But whenever inequality has been limited, it was never on the sort of individualistic, and often antistatist, basis that human rights share with their market-fundamentalist doppelgänger.

And when it comes to mobilizing support, the chief tools of the human rights movement — the critique of state repression and the melioration of disasters of war — are simply not fit for use in the socioeconomic domain. It is in part because the human rights movement is not up to the challenge that it has been condemned to offer no meaningful alternative, and certainly no serious threat, to market fundamentalism."

Do Human Rights Increase Inequality?