One of Ayn Rand’s most notorious claims is that Europeans and their descendants were justified in driving Indian tribes off their landsbecause aboriginal Americans “did not have the concept of property or property rights,” and because they “wish[ed] to continue a primitive existence.” Rand also claims the Indian tribes had no right to the land they lived on because “they didn’t have a settled society,” and “had predominantly nomadic tribal ‘cultures.’” Rand even uses scare quotes around “cultures” to perhaps imply that Indian culture was not any type of culture at all.
Today, many critics of laissez-faire liberalism (i.e., libertarianism) continue to quote these lines in order to indict all defenders of private property, whom critics like to associate with Rand’s peculiar ideology.
As with so many accusations that conflate Rand’s beliefs with libertarians, this is misplaced. Many libertarian writers have approached the issue from a a perspective which assumes the tribes were treated unjustly. Leonard Liggio, for example, discussed the issue from this perspective in the early 1970s, and Rothbard repeatedly wrote with sympathy in Conceived in Liberty about the tribes who interacted with colonial Americans. To this day, Indian-tribe sovereignty, as weak as it is, continues to be an important check on federal power.
Regardless of how one views European and American policy toward the tribes, however, the argument that the tribes and individual Indians had no concept of property – and thus whites were justified in seizing tribal lands – is a terrible argument for a variety of reasons.
This post was published at Ludwig von Mises Institute on Oct 9, 2010.
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