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.

First let me state that I only read the tag line here.

With that said there is NOTHING wrong (or against Objectivism) with allowing your money to make money due to investments.

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.

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.

I have read some of this author's work. On the financial stuff, for me, it was all sizzle and no steak. But, I loved his commentary on public education. His father was a mucky-muck in public schools in Hawaii and he gives some great insight on the history of public education.

not sure what you are attributing to "RichDadPoorDad"...the idea of accumulating wealth by letting your money work for you is the capitalist way...your money should work hard for you...you should not have to work hard for your money...knowing how to make your money work hard for you involves thought and effort...as in RichDad buying homes and renting them out to others not as wise with their money...

i have employed this strategy all my life and it has worked out well...i had to earn the money to buy the house and then find a renter that would take care of my investment...

now, i do the same thing in stocks and options...i buy an option long term for around $.10 on the dollar of what it would cost to buy the stock...then i sell the front month...if i have researched the company i am buying the long term option properly, it should continue to go up...this is call a LEAPS strategy...selling the front month option against it is called a Synthetic Buy Write, which is simulating a Covered Call (which simulates buying a house and renting it out)...this is what is called working smarter not harder...i am able to make up to 10 times the profit in the same amount of time...I did this with AZO (auto zone parts) at the start of 2009...because of the recession, individuals were holder onto their cars longer, requiring more repairs for upkeep...AZO went from $100/share to almost $800 today...an 800% increase is not bad, but i have made well over $30,000 in the same amount of time by letting my money make money...

One area where this discussion gets hairy is with respect to children and inheritance. In this area, a fundamental belief in property rights implies a fundamental belief in unearned wealth - wealth given or bequeathed purely due to parental affection, with no consideration to the works or values of the recipient.

Is this a strawman troll? In the case of Pure Capitalism, the 'money' is 'working' because it is invested or loaned and is 'at-risk' that means the money is effectively exchanges for partnership/ownership. The profits returned (if any) are different dollars than the ones originally supplied.

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?

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.)

Sp_cebux:
Question: Do you view value/wealth as a concrete, an abstraction or a potentiality?
Often, I run into a person who thinks of "wealth" as:
There is (X) amount of "wealth" in this world...some have it and some don't.
...or rather: "Wealth" is something that comes to a person through conniving and manipulation rather than by working.
If that is your starting point, then take some time and consider how much "wealth" there is in the world today vs. how much there was 10,000 years ago ...
...and what is the difference?
How did the increase happen?

One of RD's key missions is to convince people to put a significant amount of their money into an income-producing asset (like a rental property) vs something that is best described as consumption (like a house or a car). As a landlord who does a lot of his own maintenance, I can attest that this job cannot be done "without effort." I do outsource many jobs, but always manage the process and often supervise the work. All of that takes time and effort, too. So, I would not say that what I do is entirely "individual effort," although there is plenty of that. The Objectivist virtue of Independence does not mean you do it all yourself. There is a great deal of commonality in what RD advises and the way an Objectivist conducts business.

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.

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!

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.

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