NEELS BLOM: Security net is a great thing, but only if you’re free to cast it where you choose
Changes are afoot at the Road Accident Fund as the fund’s acting CEO Lindelwa Jabavu says it is chronically insolvent, and it creates what she calls the lotto effect
Flyfishers know about Parys, Free State. Upstream and down from the bridge over the Vaal River you are free to cast for smallmouth yellowfish and afterwards to find beer and luxuriate over lunch, but just then the Belgian philosopher Philippe van Parijs occurs and things change. Van Parijs is the contemporary proponent of a basic income grant, a social-security safety net first described by Fabian George Cole, though Van Parijs’s iteration is more about providing capitalism with a way out of its supposed inequality dilemma. Famously, he said the grant should have no strings attached, which roused authoritarians everywhere. Of great importance to flyfishers is Van Parijs’s qualifiers for what constitutes freedom: in the first instance freedom from authoritarians and their institutions proscribing species such as trout and, second, freedom from physical constraints such as a lack of cash. It means you might be free to fish the Vaal in its polluted state, but if you value your health, ...
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