The Land Tenure Reforms of D.C. McTavish

Land Tenure --

A Possible Way Forward Provided by the Past

Two recently-published books, Jared Diamond's The World Until Yesterday, What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? and Jerry Mander's The Capitalism Papers, Fatal Flaws of An Obsolete System, share insights into what a future post-capitalist world will or should look like.

Of a similar bent is a book written by a rural Alberta teacher some 75 years ago.

The book is Individualism versus Socialism, written in 1939 by D.C. McTavish, a missionary who had been the first schoolteacher in Fort McMurray. The Ecole McTavish, Fort McMurray, is named after him.

Growing up on a farm, Douglas Craig McTavish used his spare time after the chores were done to self-study world history. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations opened his mind to the economic basis of social problems, and his reading of Henry George's classic work Progress and Poverty provided him with what he thought was their solution.

According to McTavish, there is individual land ownership and then there is individual land ownership. One is based on the Roman property law that we live under today, in which a person owns as much land as he wants, to do with what he wants, even letting it lay empty for speculation purposes.

Like Henry George, McTavish observed how this system led to concentration of land ownership and dispossession of the great mass of the population, denying them the opportunity to grow their own food. He saw the historical pattern whereby upsets like the French Revolution periodically erupt in all civilizations based on that system.

As well as being a schoolteacher, McTavish was also a Presbyterian missionary and his Bible studies showed him a different kind of land ownership, one based on Hebrew law under which land could not be bought or sold, could not be used to obtain a mortgage, and due to this was held in the securest tenure possible. (This system is similar to the land tenure in effect on Indian reserves today, which Harper is eager to change.) The individualism of the Hebrew economy based on usehold tenure secured to every Hebrew his economic equality, freedom and independence to the end of time - or, as it turned out, until the Romans came and abolished it.

McTavish noted that the Hebrew people were planted on the land at one time, with each family head receiving an allotment of land. But a system very like that one could be established in Canada, he said, through government appropriation of economic rent, which would go into the government coffers. This way of raising money is the "natural, reasonable, and ethically correct basis of public revenue," McTavish concluded. "In no other way can labour be emancipated from the tyranny of the present so-called, or rather mis-called, capitalistic system than by the abolition of all tariffs, taxes (direct and indirect) and other restrictions that penalize industry."

McTavish quoted England's Lord Snowden who said "Land is essentially different from every other material property. It is from the land that all human needs are supplied and if that original source is monopolized, its owners hold the destinies of the community in their hands."

Because we live from hand to mouth, McTavish wrote, we live not on the stores of the past but on the products of the present, therefore land is the physical basis of all civilizations, and thus, "equality of opportunity on the part of all men through freedom of access to Nature's great storehouse, the land and/or natural resources, is as imperative in the industrial society of a machine age, as they were in any period of the past or ever shall be to the end of time."

Quoting Henry George, John Stuart Mill and the Bible, McTavish gave proof that the right of property should apply only to the products of a person's hands and no person or country has just claim to hold proprietary rights to land or the natural resources therein. Natural resources and agricultural harvests are gifts from God, he says, and should be accepted and used prudently, not destroyed nor held out of production to keep up prices.

Usehold tenure is ridiculed, he wrote, but is ideally perfect and ethically correct. It secures to the occupier of the soil the full returns of his toil, in his immunity from all other forms of taxation excepting any possible federal legislation. The land-user would pay an annual rental value of the land, apart from all improvements, thus precluding the possibility, as well as the necessity of a land mortgage, which he wrote was the worse cause of ill in our civilization.

A person who has no mortgage on his land, McTavish asserted, can live through any depression as long as the sun shines and crops grow. This assertion is supported by books in today's age such as Five Acres and Independence, which outline a nature-based lifestyle that, to be fair, does necessitate considerable personal sacrifice.

Freedom from mortgages, McTavish prophesied, meant that land-users would not be caught up in the "selling complex" that led to over-production, overseas imperialism by nation-states and wars for export markets. The lack of mortgages would also forestall the atrocious exploitation of natural resources that, he wrote, had been occurring for 50 years at that time (and continues to this day).

And further, he said, "If we abolish the monopoly of land, we collapse the so-called capitalistic system and abolish the entire system of unjust profits. It is in the ownership of land that our capital and monied interests find the basis of their dominance and tyranny in the present-day business world."

Socialization of land, he wrote, did not preclude socialization of the utility companies, such as gasoline, natural gas, electricity, and water corporations, but he asked "what good would socialization of utilities be if land is not socialized? The irresistible tendency would be for the rent of land, if capitalized, to ultimately absorb the benefits that would arise from the socialization of utilities."

Despite the radical tenor of his book, McTavish was no Socialist or Communist. He corrects Henry George who stated, to the satisfaction of socialists "we must make land common property". McTavish says George did not mean making land public property or putting it under government ownership but the establishment of usehold tenure.

He also gave space to two former socialists who had turned away from the cause. Long-time Socialist speaker John Spargo renounced socialism because he foresaw that government ownership would be less adaptable to new inventions and to experiments, and even if that were not the case, government ownership would lead to bureaucracy and thus loss of political freedom and the destruction of individual liberty through the subjugation of citizens to the will of the government instead of the subjugation of the government to the will of the citizens.

The other former Socialist quoted, Max Eastman, too saw the rise of a totalitarian regime in the USSR under Stalin in the 1930s and that political power was being shifted to bureaucrats. He foretold that that country's "experiment in socialism" could not last long under that system.

McTavish, unlike many socialists, did not endorse the goal of far-reaching State ownership. In his opinion, the assumption by the State of the ownership, direction and control of all the processes of production, exchange and distribution of wealth would be a violation not only of Natural Law but of the Moral Law, for "it would be an attempt to invest a Government, or a committee of government, with an Infinite intelligence that no group of men does, ever has or ever shall possess."

That socialism is atheistic, he said - it denies the proprietary right of God in land and natural resources and invests the State with that right. Atheistic socialism denies the right of God to the land, the right of every man to the products of his labour.

On the other hand, McTavish said there was a theistic socialism based on the teaching of Moses, the Hebrew prophets and Christ Himself. This type of socialism, based on usehold tenure of land, has an individualistic basis and pulls together both socialism and individualism.

On the question of Luddites, McTavish wrote it is not machines and automation that are to blame for unemployment but it is the failure of our society to protect the right of every human being to be his or her own employer that is responsible for involuntary unemployment the world over. Drawing a word-picture of the world as it is and the beautiful place the world could be, he wrote, "The speculative tenure on land is the cause of our cities being full of unemployed men, the children of these cities haunting the garbage heaps for crumbs of bread and the floods that have devastated the lower reaches of the Ohio, the Missouri, and the Mississippi.

"It is the atheistic basis of our civilization that denies the proprietary rights of the Creator to our natural resources, replacing it with a system of speculative tenure on land that has made possible and profitable the exploitation of urban suburbs by real estate syndicates, with millionaires at one extreme and unemployed men and hungry children at the other, and the exploitation of vast timber areas at the headwaters of these rivers, causing the denudation of these forests and the destruction of the leafy screen that would have held back the rains and delivered them in their due season to the enrichment, instead of the destruction, of these devastated river regions. So that instead of smiling valleys with the prosperous happy millions basking in the sunshine of Heaven's favour, we have the bleak and sullen ruin of desolated regions, with incalculable loss of life and property, a spectacle to make the angels weep and the devils rejoice."

Without opportunity to grow their own food, workers are prey to whomever will hire them, he said, and produced historical examples where the lack of opportunity to use land had produced suffering.

He gave the example of how in 1909 in the waning years of the Klondike Gold Rush, the land had been concentrated in a few companies and employees in the mines were paid less than a person could live on. When a new goldfield opened, the workers moved there and the mine-owners to get staff were forced to pay more, which they were well able to do. McTavish said this proved access to natural opportunities of Land determined the level of wages paid.

"The fundamental cause of unemployment," McTavish wrote in 1939, "is plain to anyone who will take the elevator to the top of the McLeod Building and cast his eyes northward - hundreds and thousands of acres of land held out of use by mortgage companies, real estate syndicates and capitalistic corporations." In the last category, McTavish must have put the City of Edmonton, which at the time was one of the largest land owners in the city, having seized great swathes of it for tax arrears following the 1912/13 economic collapse, and then like any corporation was holding it empty to sell when the economy picked up.

The trouble caused by speculative control of land was nothing new, McTavish wrote. Rome, for example, paid the price for their use of that system of land ownership. Within 600 years from the founding of the City of Rome, most of the land in Italy had passed into the hands of only two thousand people and the great mass of the Roman people had become tenants and slaves of these favoured few. This unbalanced land ownership led to the calamitous collapse of the Roman Empire, he said.

According to McTavish, his Bible studies taught him that those who break Natural Law by monopoly control and mis-use of the Land are punished. He wrote "How tremendous and portentous are the social and economic implications of Matthew (21:44) 'And whoever shall fall upon this stone will be broken...' This is the epitaph of every past civilization. For written upon every page of human history and civilization with the point of a diamond, ineffaceable and ineradicable, as eternally true and as imperatively valid in Edmonton and Alberta today as in Jerusalem and Judea 3000 years ago, are the Lord's words 'The land shall not be sold for ever, for the land is mine' (Leviticus 25:23)."

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Douglas Craig McTavish was named one of 100 Outstanding Albertans (Calgary Stampede)

Living 1863-1954, he was a northern missionary and educator.

His write-up reads:

In 1912, Douglas Craig McTavish moved to Fort McMurray in search of economic opportunities while also serving as a lay missionary for the Presbyterian Church. McTavish was born in Tavistock, Ontario, and educated at the University of Toronto and Columbia University. Besides establishing a church, Douglas and his wife Cassia opened Fort McMurray's first schoolhouse, where Douglas worked as the unofficial superintendent while Cassia was the emerging town's first schoolteacher. The McTavishes were critical in the survival of public education in Fort McMurray through to their departure in 1923. They organized two tax sales to provide funds to cover wages and the construction of an additional school.

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Douglas Craig McTavish Ecole McTavish, Fort McMurray land reform Bible Single Tax social gospel