The most likely reason why there are supposedly no records of Robert Kiyosaki's property or bankruptcy is because he probably put the property in the name of a small company (most likely an LLC), rather than his own personal name. I don't own any real estate myself, but I've talked to a professional business consultant who does, and he's told me there are ways where you can make it so your own name is never attached to any of your properties. That way, if people happen to search your name in a database, you show up as owning nothing. It's a tactic that more savvy real estate investors use to protect their assets. Robert Kiyosaki says essentially the same thing in one of his books, "Own nothing, control everything."

If he's going to just "pile on" arguments over time, he should at least have some kind of filter and not bring up irrelevant information like what Robert's preferred name was, or that he used to be fat and then lost the weight. Bringing up things like that just undermines his own arguments.

She didn't KNOW that was the antidote, she simply assumed it was. She developed a theory, but it was never tested, and there is a lot of evidence against it.

While the Civil Rights Act and the war on poverty may have been closely connected at the time of their passage, let's not jump to the conclusion that they were both bad simply because the latter of the two produced results which were counter-productive to its initial goal. Though a connection does exist, a divorce is possible.

Actually, I just recognize that the war on drugs disproportionally targets black people. It's not racist to recognize when racism is occurring. What's racist is to defend or deny it.

Ron Paul on how the war on drugs is racist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tgjs58i7...

"The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness," by Michelle Alexander & Cornel West:
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Crow-Incar...

I have. What are you trying to suggest?

Not really. I think I've delved pretty deeply into her philosophy.

Right, I understand that as well. I don't advocate equal outcomes, equal wealth, or any of that other socialist nonsense. What I advocate is equal rights under the law and equal treatment in society.

My misrepresentations have been explained to me? Have they? By whom?

"Maph, you are being particularly obstinate on your own post here, and have crossed over into emotional realm which means in order to keep the argument going you are mis characterizing and so therefore you have lost some influence."
---
Is this sentence directed at me or ewv?

Also, I've stated a couple times now that I listened to Atlas Shrugged as an audio book, which I do not believe is any different from reading it as a physical book. It's literally the exact same material. The only difference is whether I'm receiving the information through my sense of hearing or my sense of sight. If I learned to read braille and then found a braille version of the book, I could even potentially receive the information through my sense of touch (I can't read braille, that's just a hypothetical, but you get the idea). As long as the information enters my mind and is interpreted as cognitive imagery, does it really matter which of my sensory organs it came through?

Hmmm, that's a good argument. Thanks for your input. +1

:)

You know what? I'm done replying to you. Every single response you've written to my arguments essentially amounts to nothing more than, "You don't don't understand Ayn Rand correctly, you're wrong, shut up." You provide no argumentation of your own, and instead only spout off angry denunciation of my own arguments. If you want to debate with me, I'd be more than happy to engage you. I love debate. But please, at least put some thought into what you say, tell me WHY you disagree, and what your own interpretations of Ayn Rand's writings are. Simply asserting that I'm wrong without providing any further explanation is not a valid argument.

I actually don't consider myself a progressive. I identify more as a left-leaning libertarian, or a classical liberal. I've also called myself a consequentialist-libertarian, and khalling has, at different times, referred to me as a bleeding heat libertarian and a social justice libertarian, both of which are labels that I feel are accurate descriptions of my political position. My favorite candidates during the 2012 presidential election were Gary Johnson, followed closely by Ron Paul, though I strongly dislike Rand Paul (yes, I know Rand Paul wasn't running, but I still don't like him; his policies are too different from his father's). I guess you could call me a "liberaltarian," the kind of libertarian that everyone loves to hate. When I'm surrounded by liberals, they tend to think I'm a far-right conservative. When I'm surrounded by conservatives, they tend to think I'm a far-left liberal. I don't change, but the way people interpret my opinions does.

I had a philosophy teacher a while ago who said he used to think he was a conservative when he lived in New York, but when he moved to Utah everyone perceived him as being a radical liberal, even though his views and opinions remained exactly the same. What this demonstrates, at least in my opinion, is that the political position which we perceive both ourselves and others to embody is dependent upon our current environment almost as much as it is upon our actual beliefs.

I've noticed that many of the other people on this forum seem to be from the south-east, while I'm from the mid-west, so cultural difference could potentially be a contributing factor in the disparity of opinion. Part of it could also be a generational gap, as I've noticed a significant percentage of people here are in their forties, fifties, and even sixties, whereas I'm 28 and still in college. When you take a 49 year old man from the south-east and put him in the same room as a 28 year old guy from the mid-west, the probability that they'll agree with each other is very slim, as have we have seen several times over in my debates with the other people in this forum.

You call my perspective "statist," but I prefer to think of it more as "anti-anarchist." I strongly dislike anarchism as a political theory, and a big problem I have with Ayn Rand's philosophy is that she claimed it was supposedly anti-Communist, but really it was just anti-government. As an example of this, consider the situation surrounding the motion picture adaptation of her book "We The Living" in 1942. The film, which was produced without Rand's permission in Fascist Italy during the rule of Mussolini, was initially allowed because the Fascist government at the time thought the film was anti-Communist propaganda. And given how much the Fascists and the Communists hated each other (Black shirts versus Red shirts), a story ridiculing the Soviet Union and its Communist government was thought to be a good thing, and so the Fascists allowed it. But once the movie was released, and the people of Italy started flocking to see it, the government officials realized that it was just as much anti-Fascist as it was anti-Communist (after all, it was critical of all government), and so they pulled it from the theaters and demanded that all copies of the film be burned. Thankfully, the producers of the film decided to save the negatives in a locked box in the basement of one of their homes, and they burned another unimportant film in its place.

Now you might be thinking, "Oh, well Fascism and Communism are pretty much the same as each other anyway, so it makes sense that 'We The Living' could simultaneously criticize them both under the guise of criticizing the latter, but that doesn't mean Ayn Rand was critical of ALL government." This may have been a valid argument, were it not for the fact that Ayn Rand also criticized the American government in her first televised interview with Mike Wallace in 1959, during which she made the absurd claim that both parties were socialist. Apparently Ayn Rand believed that "socialism" referred to any government which establishes and enforces laws and regulations. Maybe you'll argue that that's not how Ayn Rand defined socialism, but I think the fact that she advocated a total separation of government and economy (something which has never existed, by the way, not even in 19th century America), along with her obvious belief that regulation never serves any legitimate purpose, reveals that she absolutely would have considered any and all government regulation to be a form of socialism, which is totally absurd. If that's the definition of socialism that we're operating under, then there has never been a non-socialist government in the history of mankind, nor will there ever be one in the future. Ayn Rand's definition of socialism was so broad that it included every possible form of government. In short, she was an anarchist, although she didn't realize it. Ayn Rand claimed to have hated anarchy, but the descriptions she provides of her ideal society (Galt's Gulch) can be called nothing else but an endorsement of anarchism. I don't think she contradicted herself intentionally, but her understanding of business, government, and human nature were all so shallow that she inadvertently did so anyway. That other guy, ewv, has said I just don't understand Ayn Rand, but I don't think that's actually the case. I think I understand her arguments very well, but I also understand the counter-arguments against her, and many of them are incredibly valid. You say that the disputes against Ayn Rand's philosophy are not based on reason, but all that tells me is that you haven't bothered to actually delve into the disputes or attempt to look at things from another perspective. Granted, some arguments do amount to nothing more than ad homonym attacks, but there are many which really are based on reason. Anyone who denies that has obviously not bothered to actually look at the arguments, or they deliberately ignore them.

As for where I stand on economic issues, my favorite economic theorist is Ludwig von Mises who, unlike Rand, provided me with what I felt was a logical and scientific explanation as to why Communism doesn't work. Although I agree with Ayn Rand's conclusion that Communism and Socialism are tyrannical and despotic (just look at what's going on in Venezuela), I don't feel that she ever provided a satisfactory argument to support that conclusion, as a vast majority of her arguments typically rely almost entirely on appeals to emotion and argumentation by assertion, neither of which are scientifically valid methods of establishing or proving a point. Many Objectivists don't want to admit that most of Ayn Rand's arguments are based on emotion rather than logic, but if you read the books "Without a Prayer: Ayn Rand and the Close of Her System," by John W. Robbins, and "Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature," by Greg S. Nyquist, they expose this aspect of her reasoning quite well. And when I compare Ayn Rand's writings against those of Ludwig von Mises, it becomes painfully obvious to me what the difference is between a genuinely logical argument and an emotionally charged one. Even though Rand and Mises both attack Communist/Socialist theory, Mises does it in a way that is calm, cool, and collected, and actually narrows in and focuses on real arguments presented by actual Marxists, whereas Rand tends to simply write long-winded and angry rants about any opinions she dislikes, even if they have nothing to do with Marxism. A significant portion of John Galt's speech at the end of Atlas Shrugged is really more of an attack on Christianity and religion than it is an attack on Marxism. The fact that Ayn Rand considered her ideological enemy to be Immanuel Kant rather than Karl Marx reveals the utter lack of focus and direction in her line of thinking. If you're trying to refute Marxism, it doesn't make sense to attack non-Marxists.

I frequently get accused of being a statist and an advocate of totalitarianism, but don't worry, I actually abhor Communism and Fascism just as much as the rest of you – I'm just not an Objectivist. I've noticed that some of the more ardent and enthusiastic proponents of Ayn Rand seem to think that a rejection of Objectivism is automatically an embrace of Communism and Fascism; but I think that looking at the world through such a simplistic lens is misleading, and says more about the person who thinks that way than it does about the person they're accusing.

I recently took a philosophy class in which one of the other students was legitimately a full-blown Communist – and I don't mean he was just a progressive liberal, I mean he openly called himself a Communist – and I often liked to poke fun at him for the ridiculous amount of control that he thought government should have over people's personal lives. To illustrate, let me tell you a story: in the philosophy class, each student was required, over the course of the semester, to give a presentation in which they would apply a particular philosophy to a specific case study. And on the day the Communist guy gave his presentation, he chose to address America's problem with obesity, arguing that a Communist government could eliminate obesity by rationing and regulating the amount of food that everyone was allowed to eat, at which point I shouted out, "Yes! People are very skinny in North Korea!" The whole class laughed at that, as immediately prior to his presentation, another girl in the class had also given a presentation on Communism, except that she was against it, and she talked about how the Communist government of North Korea was causing its own citizens to starve to death. So everyone had context, which made the Communist guy's argument appear absurd. I don't think he liked me very much.

Anyway, I guess I kind of went overboard on my response there. Does that answer your question regarding my personal philosophical foundation?

That statement is certainly ripe for debate. For instance, should you be able to build a junkyard in a neighborhood of million dollar houses? that of course is the original purpose of zoning laws which are legal under the constitution of most states. "Natural rights are not absolute" especially when they interfere with my rights. it is one of the few political areas where compromise is legitimate.

Fred

Re: dbhalling,
I agree with all your points, but you must acknowledge that our building codes are necessary from an engineering standpoint. Without question, our building and engineering codes and principles have allowed us to be on the forefront of building skyscrapers and other engineering marvels that match up or exceed any in the world.

I think that we are talking about different types of rules. I'm talking about safety oriented ones and you are talking about inventive ones. We both agree that government should never stand in the way of new materials or engineering for any other purpose than safety. What you build or develop that will reach the public market does affect other people. The fine line begins when you invent a new stove in your house and it blows up my house next door along with yours. Laws of that type should always be written by specialists in each field and not for any competitive reasons as they often are.

Fred

re: LetsShrug,
Your question is a good one. We need to have good people stand for school board elections, this becomes even more important with Common core on the near horizon.

Fred