Ayn Rand on Indigenous Wealth: A Conversation About Freedom and Creation

Interviewer: Ms Rand, governments around the world are exploring ways to help Indigenous nations rebuild wealth after generations of dispossession. What would you tell them?

Rand: I would tell them to stop pretending that wealth can be given.
Wealth is a creation of the mind. It does not exist in nature; it must be thought into existence, produced, and owned.

If you give wealth without creation, you are not helping people—you are teaching them dependency.

Interviewer: But these nations were stripped of their land and capital. Don’t they deserve restitution?

Rand: Justice demands that stolen property be returned.
But justice ends there.
Once the wrong is righted, the future belongs to those who produce.

No one can atone for history by destroying the present. If you wish to respect human dignity, give people freedom, not guardians.

Interviewer: You make it sound like the State has no role at all.

Rand: The State has one role—to protect rights, not redistribute outcomes.
If Indigenous entrepreneurs wish to build, the government’s duty is to secure their contracts and protect their property. Beyond that, every interference poisons initiative.

Interviewer: Still, many Indigenous businesses struggle to attract capital. Markets are not neutral; they reflect existing power.

Rand: Markets reflect ability, not pity.
If your idea is sound, capital will come. If it is not, no government decree can save it.

The tragedy of modern policy is that it confuses compassion with competence. It funds failure and punishes excellence in the name of fairness.

Interviewer: But what about collective ownership—shared land, community trusts, co-ops? Aren’t those forms of wealth too?

Rand: They are forms of stagnation.
A committee cannot create; it can only divide.
The moment you separate reward from effort, you extinguish ambition.

A nation cannot build wealth by sharing its losses.

Interviewer: Yet surely you can see that history left deep inequalities.

Rand: Of course. But inequality is not an argument against freedom—it is an argument for it.
Only free individuals can rebuild what oppression destroyed.

Give people the moral right to own their success, and they will surprise you. Deny it, and you will get endless programs instead of progress.

Interviewer: You sound certain that markets can solve everything.

Rand: Not everything—only the things worth solving.
Markets cannot heal grief or restore language or culture. But they can give a person the means to live without permission.

That, to me, is the first form of dignity.

Interviewer: And if a people chooses collective ownership as an expression of culture?

Rand: Then they must bear its consequences, just as I must bear mine.
Freedom includes the right to fail.

But no government should romanticise poverty as identity. The purpose of wealth is to extend human possibility, not to freeze it in tradition.

Interviewer: Final thought, then?

Rand: Stop apologising for success.
If Indigenous nations wish to be free, they must embrace the same law that governs all creation: think, produce, own.
Compassion may console the past; only production can shape the future.

Sebastian Vanderzeil is Director of Strabo Rivers, an economic consultancy specialising in infrastructure, water, and investment strategy. This essay reimagines a conversation with Ayn Rand about freedom, creation, and the uneasy role of the State in Indigenous wealth.