epistemologue

This is a good point (though perhaps not applicable to the OP)... it's really pathological to question whether something is rational *just because you are interested in it*. If you like something, that is positive evidence that it *is* rational, all other things being equal. Pleasure is not the result of sin, it is a result of virtue. It's not a cost, it's an end in itself. If you like something, that is not a signal that you should stop and carefully think about it. The natural inclinations and innate desires in human nature are not rigged against your rational self-interest. There is no original sin in Objectivism.
If you have some reason to question whether something is rational or right, then by all means stop and be careful. But *just being interested in something*, just *liking* something, is *not* a reason to question whether it's rational or right.

This is a good point (though perhaps not applicable to the OP)... it's really pathological to question whether something is rational *just because you are interested in it*. If you like something, that is positive evidence that it *is* rational, all other things being equal. Pleasure is not the result of sin, it is a result of virtue. It's not a cost, it's an end in itself. If you like something, that is not a signal that you should stop and carefully think about it. The natural inclinations and innate desires in human nature are not rigged against your rational self-interest. There is no original sin in Objectivism.
If you have some reason to question whether something is rational or right, then by all means stop and be careful. But *just being interested in something*, just *liking* something, is *not* a reason to question whether it's rational or right.

I'm at a loss at how to state this more clearly. Let me try to answer in the style of Dr. Seuss's "green eggs and ham":
I would not murder someone in a house
I would not murder them with a mouse
I would not murder someone here or there
I would not murder them ANYWHERE!
I would not, I could not on a boat
I will not, will not, with a goat
I will not murder someone in the rain
I will not murder someone with a train
Not in the dark! Not in a tree! 
Not in a car! You let me be! 
I will not murder someone!
***
Seriously though, there is no trade you can offer me that would make it worth it, it doesn't matter what are the stakes, it doesn't matter how many murders, tortures, or rapes you put on the other side. Why? Because it's a moral principle based on the metaphysical nature of man. It's a matter of integrity, and as Rand has demonstrated in her fiction and philosophy, to sacrifice one's integrity is irrational.
Intentionally killing an innocent man cannot add value to the world or to your life; all values that are produced in the world come from such men, and to murder them goes against the cause of your interests. All of those deaths you want to put at stake are not caused by this innocent man, destroying him can only add to the destruction and affirm the evil. If you want to stop the destruction and fight this evil, you must stop it at its cause. In a hypothetical where you are cut off from that cause and there is nothing you can do to stop it, the only choice remaining to you is to not add to the evil in the world in your own actions and in your own person. You can only fight evil by standing on principle for the good in your own person in the alternatives and choices available to you.

This is completely back-asswards.

I mentioned it to point out that you are at least able to freely leave, while in Soviet Russia you'd be shot at the Berlin Wall. It'd be foolish to consider that taxation in the US is as unjust as being sent to the gulag, or as unjust as eminent domain in the US. It doesn't mean I'm okay with it if I say there is a pretty good degree of freedom regarding taxes despite some real injustices.
They lacked representation in Parliament, and the taxes that were at issue was on tea they did not want, and a number pf oppressive laws that built up over time. Taxation in the colonies was done without any benefit of citizenship.

Look, I agree there are injustices. Even Epist does. But it's blown out of proportion. See below. Oppression isn't the same as all injustice. It starts to look like hyperbole when there are substantially worse injustices. Sorta like this (it's a joke, don't read into it):
Historical note: The Tea Act was a bailout of the British East India Company. The tea was made cheaper than normal for the colonists. More or less, the British were saying "look guys, cheap tea!" The colonists responded as "thanks, but we don't want the tea anyway". Not taking well to this, the British said "well, we're sending it, and you'll buy it". So the tea was sent on 4 ships to different ports. 2 ports sent the ships back. One port didn't let the British unload the tea. Boston totally trashed the tea. That's when it all went downhill.
Taxation was always a negotiable issue, as unjust as some tax policies were. Those tax laws were worse than today, except for income tax. There are substantial rights violations that wholly deny your life, and rights violations which impede your life yet still be ironed out and smoothed over.
All laws - taxation laws included - are part of a wider system of laws. That is, the law is the means in which to protect your life and property. As a system, they work together. Some parts are unjust, so those are amended later on. It isn't always a sacrifice to follow an unjust law, especially if it is negotiable and able to be improved by existing mechanisms within the system. Or if your life isn't -immediately- threatened. This is the rule of law. Errors occur, yet we don't throw it out and break the law piecemeal as it suits us. Breaking the law, if it's rational, presumes a significant and wide area of the law failing to tend towards protecting rights. Many civil rights protests showed major violations in the law. Taxation isn't at that stage. When an ENTIRE system tends to rights violations on a major scale (USSR), then that suggests no actual -objective- rule of law, so breaking those "laws" becomes respect for -objective- law.

???

What if owning the place you sleep at night had a substantial impact on the child prodigy speed at which the world has evolved in the last 200 years?  What if rent is dragging us back into the feudalism of the dark ages?
Consciousness and existence are corollaries.  No consciousness without existence, no existence without consciousness.  If you own your self isn't it significant to own your shelter? 

What is your problem? That was a brilliant article, very well researched and well argued from an Objectivist standpoint. That is not spam at all, jesus you are biased.

ARI Watch has a devastating article of the same title: Ayn Rand on Immigration.

Why would it be an elaborate fallacy of composition? I explain in the paper that the composition isn't really important, and doesn't matter what something is composed of to be an object. I explain that causality matters. If I am wrong, then please argue against my claims or find the error if there is one.
The bound of a universe is all that exists, i.e. it is its own boundary. It is still boundless as far as a "hard limit" does not exist, but the universe is exactly as big as all things in totality that exist. However this is NOT sufficient for objecthood. So, I go on to argue that emergent, systematic, and relational combination is sufficient. I think that the universe meets those conditions.

... you can't possibly be serious

Objectivist Ed Powell has written a paper against the open borders immigration position of other Objectivists (Binswanger, Tracinski, Biddle, Bernstein, Duke).
This raises the question: Does a foreigner have a right to cross an international border?  Powell says no.  Powell says the burden of proof that any applicant for entry is not a threat to the freedom or security of the country lies with the applicant.  
The paper is well written, the position well argued.  For reference: Binswanger's essay and Biddle's essay

I don't really care if you respond or not Nicky.  I'll sleep just fine tonight.

Japan has no natural resources to speak of and only 12% of it's land is capable of sustaining agriculture.  And yet, it's one of the wealthiest and most stable countries in the world.  
Mexico has an abundance of natural resources, minerals, oil, seafood, livestock and some of the best agricultural land in the world (54% of the land is agriculture) and yet 50% of Mexicans live in poverty - and this hasn't changed a bit since NAFTA. Mexico also enjoys a $60 Billion trade surplus with the U.S. and has access to markets around the world.
Why isn't Mexico one of the richest countries in the world per capita?
Even if, hypothetically, the U.S. were to stop all trade with Mexico, why would that devastate their economy?
Edit:  And no, I'm not a "racists".  My sister has lived in a small town in Mexico for 15 years and is married to a Mexican.  And in Oregon, Mexicans make up a large part of the subcontracting trades in construction and are some of the hardest working and most honest people you could ever want on a job site.
Mexico's internal problems have nothing to do with the U.S.  No more so than Cuba.

Grames, I'm interested in any examples that you take as justifying the belief that Objectivism supports this premise. I am very curious to see your process here.

Are you claiming that had these workers taken the pledge above (what you call a mantra) they would be in breach of it for having accepted or for keeping a job at Wal-Mart?
Are you suggesting that said Wal-Mart workers should DO something ELSE in order to live up morally to that pledge?
What do you suggest they should do, and how do they do it while NEVER asking (or forcing) another man to live for their sake?
OF a certainty IF they quit Wal-Mart they will owe nothing to Wal-Mart nor will Wal-Mart owe anything to them.

I usually recommend the book Philosophy: Who Needs It? first, and then The Virtue of Selfishness and The Romantic Manifesto. There's also Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, if that's more your area of interest.
I very strongly recommend you read Rand herself, and not some third-party. That's the best way to get value out of her philosophy.

Here is a somewhat different tack on critiquing the offered critique (refering to objCrit2.pdf).
The paper lists no author.   There is no bibliographic list of works cited.  Abstract starts out "We ..." but the first paragraph is "I ...".   Abstract makes a claim about finding internal inconsistency in Rand's epistemology, but then the first thing the author does is substitute his own definitions for Rand's terms in the name of "neutrality", immediately nullifying the entire point of the paper. The abstract is in error where it claims concepts must subsume two entities, Rand's definition is "two or more units". Rejecting the requirement that every concept subsume two or more entities is irrelevant in relation to Rand's system, doing neither good nor harm. That's my superficial and cursory take from a brief page-through and reading of the first page.  However, ambition is a good thing and I appreciate SpookyKitty's effort in making a pdf of his article.

If anybody is interested in other philosophers or movements apart from Objectivism and Aristotelian philosophy, you are welcome to share your experiences here. What attracts you to those ideas? Do they influence your own thinking or philosophical positions? For the sake of the topic, these presentations need not necessarily point out the similarities/divergences with Objectivism.
My first encounter with philosophy was a long time ago in primary school. After scrambling in my aunt's book collection, I found a Romanian philosophy textbook from the communist era. It was full of pictures and it probably covered every major philosopher known at the time, from Thales to the moderns. Marx and Engels where the only ones that had full page photographs.
At the time I didn't understand much of what I was reading, but being a philosopher seemed like a really prestigious thing. Upon reading that the history of philosophy can be described as a duel between materialist and idealist points of view (as it's commonly taught by marxists), I promptly declared myself a materialist, because idealism struck me as an extraordinarily bizarre point of view. Nobody I knew subscribed to the primacy of consciousness view. (Objectivism is the only philosophy I know of that is not monist or pluralistic in some way, although there might be many others). My first encounter with the world transcendental was on the page about Immanuel Kant, and I quickly used it afterwards in a test paper at school (it was not a philosophy test, obviously). I didn't realy know what it meant, apart from reading the dictionary definition and considering it to be one of the coolest words in my vocabulary. After the grades were announced, the teacher asked me what transcendental means and, after I blurted out the dictionary definition, she said that she just wanted to make sure that I'm not using words without knowing what they mean.
Until about half an year ago, when I started to study Objectivism seriously and I read Atlas (I knew about Objectivism much earlier than that, and I read The Fountainhead three years ago), philosophy seemed to be no less pointless than religion. After all, with all the advances in science and psychology, what could philosophers possibly bring to the table? Objectivism provided interesting answers to this question, and I am sympathetic to a lot of Objectivist positions (most strongly in metaphysics). I also emphaticaly disagree with some points, from Rand's denial of human instincts all the way to her claim that Dali's paintings portray an 'evil metaphysics'.
Lately, I remembered about that old gang of philosophers who called themselves the Idealists and decided to see exactly what line of reasoning brought them to their philosophical claims. I'm not really interested in Kant since his version of idealism is nowhere as weird as that that of his succesors (he still believed in a noumenal world), but I do have a strong interest in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Even without believing much, if any, of their speculations, it's still fascinating as hell to read about their philosophy as a classical musician. Romantic classical music composers were inevitably inspired by the contemporary trends in German philosophy; Wagner was notably a follower of Schopenhauer, although S. is a bit too Kantian (and Buddhist) to grab my interest. Speaking of Buddhism, my first encounter with detailed information about it (meditation always fascinated me) was also in a communist book of my aunt's, titled Questions and Answers Pertaining to the Atheist Education of the Youth.
If I have to take something good out of German Idealism, it's definitely the enthusiastic, creative and imaginative spirit that was its trademark (and was also present in the arts). Apparently Fichte and Schelling were extremely charismatic teachers, managing the feat of being university teachers and superstars at the same time. Hegel was notorious for his classes, which people attended without understanding a single word of what he was saying. His system is absolutely gargantuan, and nobody since him attempted such a feat. His famous claim, 'The truth is the Whole' is quoted at the beginning of Leonard Prikoff's OPAR (systems were the big trend of German Idealism)
As much as I like Rand, I have to say that the whole Romantic Realism thing never appealed to me as strongly as the movements and genres that feature a great deal of fantasy, myth, even the supernatural. And I'm an earthly guy. It seems to me that this type of art does something that Romantic Realism does not: it's a concretized presentation of some of the more 'metaphysicaly adventurous' parts of ourselves: myths, the dream world, imagination, altered states of consciousness. It also inspires me to study the broader nature of consciousness, apart from its perceptual and reasoning faculties.
I leave you with this beautiful romantic painting, The Chancel and Crossing of Tintern Abbey, Looking Towards the East Window, by JMW Turner. Exploring the visual arts of the Romantic era is also on my current to do list.

Is this thread a joke? I don't think I've ever seen such a messy hodpodge of personal misunderstandings, clunky symbolism, and arbitrary assertions cobbled together to posture as a "critique". 

The reversal you ask of is nothing else but the primacy of consciousness. This turns measurement into construction, objectivity into creation, consciousness from the faculty of perceiving that which exists into the faculty of creating it.
All of which not only undermines Oist premises but makes everything nonsensical contradictions and philosophy meaningless.
 
Identification does not "produce" identity but discovers it.
Edit: "common parlance" I've actually never heard anyone say identification "produces identities "
Where did you hear such a silly thing? The closest thing I know of is the Copenhagen "measurement miracle" of quantum mystics. 

I would say that, to the extent that one intends to live an interesting and fulfilling life, he should develop within himself the soul of an artist.
Indulge greedily in works of art, yes — but more broadly, cultivate your personal values (what you like, enjoy, appreciate, etc.), and curate your life in such a way so that your daily existence reflects and embodies that which matters most to you.

I agree completely with this. Aesthetics is a much more fundamental branch of philosophy than it normally gets credit for. I think hierarchically it should follow directly from metaphysics, and actually has implications in epistemology and ethics.
In the same sense that everyone has to be a philosopher to some extent, since man by nature must be guided by a comprehensive view of life, do you think in a sense everyone has to be an artist to some extent, since aesthetic principles also perform a necessary function in the guidance of life (when it comes to metaphysical value judgments and sense of life)?

I agree completely with this. Aesthetics is a much more fundamental branch of philosophy than it normally gets credit for. I think hierarchically it should follow directly from metaphysics, and actually has implications in epistemology and ethics.
In the same sense that everyone has to be a philosopher to some extent, since man by nature must be guided by a comprehensive view of life, do you think in a sense everyone has to be an artist to some extent, since aesthetic principles also perform a necessary function in the guidance of life (when it comes to metaphysical value judgments and sense of life)?