LAND VALUES AND OLD-AGE PENSIONS.
[To TUN EDITOR Or T1111 "8rICCTATOlt."] SIR,-1u the article on "Land Values" in the Spectator of the 8th inst. an imaginary case is cited which so nearly resembles a real one I know of that I hope you will find a place in your columns for this letter. In the case I am thinking of the facts are roughly as follows. Two persons own jointly some fifty acres or so of land about two miles from a large manufacturing town. Bits of this land have already been sold for building purposes at prices which average more than £1,000 per acre. However, the rate of sale is only about half-an-acre a year or so, and so under these conditions it would take a hundred years to sell it all. I need hardly say that the owners are ready and anxious to sell it, and they do not believe that it is a question of price at all. The fact is that there is a very limited demand for new houses, as there are some two or three thousand empty dwellings ►n the neighbouring town. The land that has not been sold as yet is partly used as a dairy farm and partly as grounds of a small house or villa. The net rent to pocket of the unsold land is about £125 a year, to be divided between the two owners. Now is this land to be valued at £1,000 per acre and a tax of £100 a year put on the owners P Neither of them is wealthy. One has, I believe, an income of about £2,000 a year, the other about £1,500 a year. I live in Ireland, and I know how some of the old-age pension money is going. Practically every one in my neighbourhood over seventy years of age (and some under it, if what I bear, is to be relied on) is getting a pension. Many, of course, are very poor, and no one could possibly grudge it to them ; but I believe that many who are getting it are in no more real need of assistance from the State than are the two persons whose case I have mentioned, and who are yet in danger of being taxed, or, rather, to put it plainly, of having their rental con- fiscated in the way I have described,—I am, Sir, Ste.,
X. Y. Z.
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