First Time in the Clara Barton Auditorium

On Wednesday, I attended a meeting in the Clara Barton Auditorium for the first time, and I had, in a sense, never been there before. I had been in that auditorium on the Concourse level of Madison Building many times, but it was only named after Clara Barton, who had been a Patent Office clerk before the Civil War and her Red Cross work, rather recently.

Letter Printed in the Financial Times

On Tuesday, the Financial Times printed a letter of mine, which they titled, “Fairer S Africa could start with urban land reform,” and here it is as they printed it:

David Pilling (“Ramaphosa must find a way to make South Africa fairer” May 24) writes of South Africa’s continued high level of economic inequality, and also states that urban land reform can play a role, there being large swaths of disused land that could be used for housing.

Reforming the property tax to fall on land alone could encourage disused land to be put to productive use, alleviating the lack of affordable housing. It could also contribute to economic equality, since land is disproportionately owned by the rich, and in South Africa, by the white. Ironically, Johannesburg and some other towns had land-only property taxes under apartheid, but authorisation for this kind of tax was ended under the democratic government.

An act to enable or even require land-only property taxes could go a long way towards addressing the country’s economic and social problems.

Nicholas D Rosen
Arlington, VA, US

They changed my wording slightly, I believe, and gave “authorization” the British spelling, but that is essentially what I wrote.