Quote of the week
Universal adult suffrage on a common voters roll is one of the foundational values of our entire constitutional order. The achievement of the franchise has historically been important both for the acquisition of the rights of full and effective citizenship by all South Africans regardless of race, and for the accomplishment of an all-embracing nationhood. The universality of the franchise is important not only for nationhood and democracy. The vote of each and every citizen is a badge of dignity and of personhood. Quite literally, it says that everybody counts. In a country of great disparities of wealth and power it declares that whoever we are, whether rich or poor, exalted or disgraced, we all belong to the same democratic South African nation; that our destinies are intertwined in a single interactive polity.
August and Another v Electoral Commission and Others (CCT8/99) [1999] ZACC 3
Piketty on taxes
[Thomas Piketty] shrugs: “As a professor I was already, like, in the top five per cent of the income distribution, and with copyrights I moved to the top one per cent or 0.1 per cent, so it’s not as if I was very low to begin with. I would have liked to pay 90 per cent tax on my copyright. I paid about 60 per cent but I think this is not enough. First, books are also speculative markets, so when you sell 2.5 million copies, it doesn’t mean your book is 1,000 times better than someone who sold 2,500 copies. I’m not naïve about that. I know how everybody at some point wants to read the same book – or buy the same book.
