Rich Dad / Poor Dad is about passive income, not about income "without doing anything". Or more accurately, magnifying the output of your effort and capital. Managing other kids to sell the newspapers for you, and maybe you make less because you are paying the kids, but you can hire more kids and sell more newspapers. Likewise, instead of leaving your money in the bank, invest it and have it work for you as well. Rich Dad was greatly in favor of real estate, which at the time it was written was looking at a very good historical run on rental properties. Today, while rents are at all time highs, it's also quite a bit more difficult to acquire the properties.

Once acquired, there is nothing easy about owning and managing rental property - you are placing your credit at risk, leveraging your future, bad things can certainly happen -it's not all peaches and cream (such as 2007-2011 in real estate), tenants sometimes don't pay the rent but your mortgage payment is still due. Here in California, you can go several months without rent while evicting someone. If it works out, you may end up with a property substantially paid for by someone else. It's unfortunate that the tax consequences also make it more difficult to consider disposing of it to ring the register, so a property ladder kind of ensues.

Managing rental property is really about "managing risk". If you have a mortgage on the property, it's unlikely you will really make much 'income' in terms of actual dollars in your pocket, it's more typical that it significantly defrays income tax on your earned income from your career or business.

Having enough of them to earn a living at it (at least something that I would quit my day-job for) becomes a full-time job in and of itself. Prior to the real estate crash though, most banks allowed people to have 4 or 8 mortgages on their credit report and still consider them for another one. World Savings actually allowed 'unlimited' rental properties and mortgages, with a limit of 10 funded by World itself. These days with government-operated mortgage underwriting, its highly unlikely to build a business that way, it would look more like buying a few properties with cash. At least here, where properties kind of start around $300,000 and go far up from there, if I had the liquid funds laying around to buy a couple of million worth of property, I wouldn't be looking to buy myself a job either...

That being said, I'll likely buy a rental property again after not having one for over a decade, but only for the tax benefit.

There's another AR - Arnold Rothstein, who remarked, "If a man is dumb, someone is going to get the best of him, so why not you? If you don't, you're as dumb as he is." Yes, this is the Arnold Rothstein who "fixed" the 1919 World Series; and it was Benjamin Franklin who defined gambling as "a tax on stupidity."

Your view isn't concurrent with Objectivism, but more like the medieval church or Islamic abhorrence of usury. Making profit from financial dealing or investment isn't without effort, so the idea that you're making money with no labor is a false premise.

There are many people who charge quite a bit for their intellectual service, involving no product or significant physical labor. Are these people at odds with Objectivist principles?

Millennials seem to have been seduced by socialist and communist propaganda that glorifies physical labor and disdains production of profit by intellectual means. It is warfare between classes. Objectivism rejects the concept of a class-based society, and supports any means of revenue generation by individual effort, including intelligent investment.

There is no such thing as making money without effort. The question is, "Whose effort?" In every case of legitimate income, there is either the effort being made or the effort had been made. In the case of the latter, what is done with the income should be at the wishes of the person earning the wealth. If a person reaps the benefit of someone else's effort, it is because the the reaper gave the other person a job, stole the wealth, or inherited the wealth. If stolen, there's no need for discussion, if inherited, the wish of the money creator and the recipient is what matters. In the case of an inheritor or the earner becoming a wealthy bum, we finally get to the point. Those people are no better than a poor bum except that the trappings surrounding them are better. Pretty obvious, don't you think?

Individual effort aside, think about value. If I produce a book once and sell it 100 times, one may be tempted to say I put no effort into 99 of them. That wouldn't be correct, for lots of reasons. The point is that the book, sold 100 times, provided value to the 100 individuals who bought it. Trading value for value is what matters. Great question!

Look at John Galt. He invented an motor/power source. If it were to be manufactured in large scale by workers, he would by proportion only have done a "small" amount of work on his part. If he made a few and sold them, then reinvested to hire people to build more, and then reinvested to build a factory to build even more, and so on... he would be using his wealth to create more wealth. Ayn Rand was opposed to those who did not earn their money - from gaining it (like via an inheritance) when they had not acquired a true respect for what it took to earn it. If they had earned money on their own in a way that allowed them to appreciate an inheritance - fine, but not a spoiled kid who never earned anything and who could not appreciate the value being passed to them. If you earn your money and trade freely with others - whether for goods or services - there is nothing wrong with that by Objectivist standards.

There are a couple of points in RDPD that I think he begins to cross the line and gets a bit ruthless. Then I think the valuation of money and aggressively trying to get it from others who can't afford it becomes an issue. He said something to the effect that he hasn't got a problem with taking stupid people's money. If you're a D' Anconia dealing with wealthy people who have not earned their fortunes that are trying to make their money off your back without doing what it takes to earn it, so be it. But, for the average blue color worker who has worked hard for their money, but doesn't understand the complexity of the deal at hand and you convince them to do it when you know they can't handle it - I don't think you should aggressively try to close the deal. Make sure they understand the deal fully - if they choose to proceed, fine. But that can become a slippery slope when you view them as idiots that need to be separated from their money.

Other than a couple of things like that, I liked RDPD - it is inspirational, promotes a work ethic, and gives additional knowledge to use in planning your life and career goals.

where would you reference the support for your argument that "individual effort is required"? I am curious.

I read those books and this is not how I remember it at all. Rich Dad was very enterprising and understood the worlds of business and investment. It takes a lot of effort to gain and effectively use such understanding. There is nothing "without effort" about it.

For same trying to sneak populist "Poor Dad" nonsense into the Gulch.

well, get Cashflow and enjoy! the rewards of the successful entrepreneur are varied in the game including philanthropy. Objectivism is a philosophy. Being successful is great, being a student of objective reason and building a philosophy of life is much more rewarding :)

Writing a book, promoting it, collecting royalties is essentially making money with decreasing effort over time. Rand did it.
However:
Once you've written one...your addicted and must write another.

Did you actually read Rich Dad / Poor Dad?

Both Dads work hard. Poor Dad is limited in his vision and his understanding. Just to take one example from the book: Rich Dad buys houses and rents them out, the rents paying the mortgages, etc., and more, bringing profit to him. And, the properties he owns build equity, value that he can sell for a profit now or (better) later. Poor Dad has only his own home, his company's retirement account, and social security ... all in all not much to bargain with.

However... Rich Dad has to bust his hump because being a landlord is not a lot of fun. And it is not guaranteed income. In real life, we rent a house, built of cheap contractor-grade materials throughout. Our landlord makes money - more power to him - but just when he least expects it, I call him to report a problem, like water under the sink... By the end of the day, we had three plumbers here...

The thing about owning rental properties is that you become tied to the land, no less than a serf. Notice that in the greatest periods of capitalism, merchants rented homes in the city. When the economy contracts, renters are free to move where the work is. We did.

But all of the being as it may, I agree with dhalling and InfamousEric in their assessments.

I think maybe you're missing the point of laissez faire capitalism and GG, as well as AR and AS.

Reardon, D'Anconia, and to some extent the others in the Gulch were building companies with scant labor as they could muster.

Yes, I concede these two ideas are not mutually exclusive now. At first, it seems though RD is promoting a lifestyle of Wall Street type greed to earn money without working for it... which seems counter to the notion of 'production' to produce wealth.

So you wouldn't consider Kiyosaki as one of the "men of the mind"?

Did D'Anconia dig the copper mines on his own? or did he use his knowledge to invest in an infrastucture to do the work for him?

Did Riordan smelt the metal on his own? or did he use his knowledge to invest in an infrastucture to do the work for him?

Thank you for the feedback. I've just been wondering about this for a while.

The first lesson Kiyosaki talks about is selling items (I think it was newspapers or magazines) around his neighborhood versus having others do the work for him... using money to have others do the work to gain him profit for just funding the business as opposed to actually doing the business himself.

One could argue that he was producing an environment for others to perform the services, however, re-reading the first chapters of A is A in Atlas Shrugged, it does not seem like Galt would have ever advocated for using wealth to beget more wealth.

A cynic might think the author promotes what he believes will sell more books.
(An objectivist cynic would not think this about Rand's books.)

RD does not advocate making money without effort and Objectivism does not advocate making money only by low level one to one effort. Objectivism is about the mind and Rand was in favor of getting paid over time after the initial effort. In fact that is what supported her most of the later part of her life. What she was against was being a bum, whether a rich or a poor bum.

Obviously NOT mutually exclusive, more like Kiyosaki's philosophy overlaps certain portions of objectivism.

That is not how I understand it at all.

Kiyosaki, is advocating financial understanding, & using that understanding to benefit oneself.

Objectivism advocates, knowledge & reasoning, & using that knowledge & reasoning to benefit oneself.

If objectivism is to win out, how can one look past the logic of R. Kiyosaki? Perhaps they are not mutually exclusive..