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My experience has been that consistent exposure to it makes more tolerable in a way. Why is pain tolerance something you want?

I can't, of course, answer for Inspector, but I think the difficulty he(and I) are up against in defending monogomy is that the reasons are largely experiential and difficult to concretize. I suspect that he and I might both be fortunate enough to have a shared experience which makes the benefits of a single love glaringly obvious. Love might not even be the right word for it. An obsession would be more correct. Like a career that truly moves you. If you have felt it, you wouldn't disagree with us, is the thought motivating the statements you respond to. When you are really passionate about someone in the way I mean, wanting another is an impossibility. The mention of sharing them, as Inspector said in a previous post, causes you to take immediate notice of where you left your firearm. If you haven't been jealous of a traffic light because it keeps the two of you apart for 3 extra minutes, then I'm sorry and hope you get to experience that kind of affection. Finding someone so exquisite that they deserve all of your attention, coupled with the knowledge that you deserve theirs-and they know it- is so fulfilling there just isn't room in your mind for someone else. The concious and emotional realization that without them, your world would be three shades of grey darker, isn't because there is something wrong with the world or because you are weak or emotionally needy, it's because this one particular value you found in it was just that great. That knowledge of their existence is enough of a value to you that you feel indebted to them...And look forward to spending your life paying off that debt. It's hard to explain the emotion without reference to the particular. Compare it to art if that helps. Something in certain pieces of art moves you because of all the pieces arranged in a particular way. It's sense of life connects to your own. It might have no impact on someone else because we all have our own particular contexts, but few would deny that art can have that emotional effect, even if the reasons for it are different for each person. Art concretizes abstractions. So do people. And if you find someone who embodies your values completely, then you don't need or want anyone else anymore then you want a meal moments after you finish thanksgiving dinner.

Often times literature is an excellent way to convey a complex idea. I am wondering what you think John Galt would have said if Dagny had stated to Galt that she was still attracted to Francisco and Rearden and would continue sleeping with them....Galt would still be her highest value but she also values these other men....she would try not to have their schedules interefere... yada, yada...Would he have understood and acquiesced to the demand?

I get what your saying. Your statement about my assumption is mainly accurate, although I would modify it in this way; I don't believe intimacy and exclusivity are things that all people value, just that they are things that all people should value.

You're right...it can't be quantified. It's qualitative in nature and as such it can be ranked. "This one is better, that one is worse" rather then lisa=8.4 and susan=9.3. And you do not find perfection, you simply find the best that you can.

No confusion. A lower standard does not translate to slut. But it is a lower standard. That is how you can get more people to qualify for a position-lower the standard. If you have a fully fleshed out hiearchy of values, then one individual will be at the top of that hiearchy. And if they are at the top of your proper value set, then they also have the self-esteem to demand your full affections.

I don't disagree. As I stated, you can certainly make two or possibly more relationships work simultaneously, depending on your standards of value with regard to relationships, but any time and energy you devote to one relationship is time and energy you cannot devote to the other. There is a cost. I suggest that the benefits of polygamy do not outweigh the cost to the relationship which is supposed to be your top value.

To clarify, by practical, I mean to say, that which is possible. If I wished to earn gold medals in archery, gymnastics, track, judo, basketball, weightlifting, disc throwing , and skeet shooting in the 08 olympics and during that time build the worlds largest retail chain from the ground up, I would be being impractical even though value could be achieved from all of those goal. I don't believe that it is bad to have multiple partners so long as no one is forced into it. Any libertarian would agree. My belief is that with values in general, you derive more value from something which you are singularly devoted to. Howard Roark was a great architect. Or he could have been a good architect and a good lawyer. Or he could have been a so so architect, a so so lawyer, and a so so doctor... I believe more joy is to be found in the greatness then the mediocrity. In the context of relationships, if you have what you believe to be 3 great romantic relationships, then I would believe that you have not had a great relationship with which to compare them to. The drawback, is that a committed relationship requires better communication and a higher degree of trust. People are risk averse and this is emotionally dangerous. In a monogomous relationship you are required to work out issue and depend on someone for the fullfillment of all of those desires derived from a romantic relationship. If you have a harem and one gal doesn't provide what you want you can drive down the street to the next and never have to deal with the difficulty. "The conclusion that I draw from this sentence is that if someone is with another person, they can not have any other relationships." No, just not more then one primary relationship. One relationship should be put first.

I agree that you would gain value from the other relationships. I could take home a new women each day and gain "value" from them. But the value(s) gained will not be worth what you are giving up by coming to know a single individual who is your "top value" deeply. Howard Roark Could gain value with a second job. He would learn a lot waiting tables or trying cases or whatever, but his architecture would suffer. It's not that he couldn't still do architecture, he would just never be as good at it as he was. It would not be as good because it was not an all consuming passion.

First, the practical is the moral. Ethics is how men ought to behave to achieve values in this universe. My mention of 4 as my personal limit was meant to be humerous. My point was that relationships don't exist in the abstract. They are connnected to actualities and those actualities have consequences in the relationship(s). If you enter into a second relationship it will detract from the value of the first in concrete measuable ways. The only way it would not, would be if the first relationship was not a significant part of your life in the first place. If you have a job that you love, say engineering, which required dedication and effort, your work with it would necessarily suffer if you took on another job. Even if the hours didn't interfere directly, you show up at (engineering)work after spending the 8 previous hours digging ditches and your attention, interest, energy, and focus will be lessened. You can have two or more relationships and make them work, but the value will never be the same as one you put your whole soul into. For me it's this simple. You get out of things what you put into them. You put a little bit into 3 relationships and you have 3 little relationships. You put everything you got into one, and then, you have something worth fighting for.

I have a problem with the use of the word intimacy and wonder if you could explain what you mean by it in concrete terms. It feels to me like it's a floating abstraction right now. Here's what I mean. Theoretically you could be intimate with any number of different people from one to 6 billion, but in actuality it is not possibe because of quantitative restraints. Building intimacy in relationships requires the investment of time, energy, focus and probably money. A great open communicative relationship doesn't happen automatically. If I was independently wealthy and retired, and approached it like a career, I can imagine, with a palm pilot and good planning, being able to squeeze in 3 maybe 4 intimate, simultaneous relationships and have all of them be fulfilling, but alas, I work and sleep most of my hours away and with the time I have left, it is barely enough to spend building a strong and loving relationship with one person. I suggest that any relationship you have outside of the primary would neccessarily reduce its value. And sure, you could keep it all in balance so that from your personal perspective it seemed that no relationship suffered, but in actuality you would be giving 50% of your available attention to each. Likewise, when you increase the harem to 4, each gets 25% Of your discretionary time, effort, focus, and money. Another factor that is pertinent is economics. If you have ever had someone share something personal with you that they have never told anyone, then you will understand what I mean. If you choose to share all of your most cherished thoughts and feelings with someone, this conveys significant trust, affection and esteem for them in a way that would be debased by making that same choice with a group. This applies equally to sex. This idea of an overflowing, infinte fountain of intimacy that you can spread far and wide sounds a little too much like the christian notion of unconditional love. You can say that you are as intimate with someone you see for one hour a month as someone you spend 3 hours a day with, in the same way that you can love warren boils as much as howard roark. All that being said, not everyone wants or is ready for the intimacy required of a serious monogomous relationship. Which is fine by me, but understand that what you are getting out of the relationships is demonstrably less thyen what you could have with an individual.

I think I see one problem. Life is not man's highest value, it is his standard of value. It is the value by which he judges all other values. It would be possible and probably likely that rational men would value some things more then their lives. It seems small but this is actually a very common and big misunderstanding.

I apologize for being unclear. I did not ignore #2. I deny that happiness, properly defined, is possible without self esteem. And that self esteem can be had without self efficacy. A looter or moocher will never develop self-efficacy. He may learn to steal well or con well and develop some sense of second handed accomplishment on those notes, but he will never feel the self-love and inner strength of a man that knows how to conquer realty. Whether or not he is even intelligent enough to realize his dependency on others isn't even relevent. It is not because something might be taken away from him that he will suffer. He will suffer because of what he will never gain. I never meant to imply that reality would punish you. As I stated before. You might very well "get away with" any manner of cheating or incompetence or evil. But what you will not be able to do is lack the virtue of productivity and still have self worth. You can't fake that. Not to yourself. Not money nor any other end result will create self-worth. The ability to create does. Happiness is the product of achieving values, but a value is not an arbitrary word applicable to anything you might whimsically desire. It is attached to a fundemental choice you make with regard to anything you do-and remember we're talking rational, longterm self interest here-Does it make me like myself more or less when the day is through?

The problem you are facing with him seems to be that you are trying to discuss how man ought to behave and he is interested in what you can get away with. Whether you are a born billionaire or a thief, it is of course possible to get away with existing for a long time, perhaps even a whole lifetime without ever producing a thing. That is not what morality is about. Different ethical systems do not explain how you need to behave to simply exist. They explain how you ought to behave in order to have a good life. To be happy. The reality part isn't that you can't get away with immoral behaviour(though usually that is the case). It's that you can't get away from the truth that you exist only as a parasite and that without someone elses productivity to loot or mooch, you would be dead. Simply put, as a looter or moocher, you are unfit for existence. That realization, even if only on a subconcious level, makes self efficacy, self-esteem, and happiness impossible no matter what outward demonstrations a person might make to try to convince you and themselves otherwise.

This reminds me of a particular aspect of montessori which I have always found to be charming. For those not familiar with the montessori classroom, there are a number of different "works" designed to teach specific principles. The children are allowed to choose a work and then find a space to do it. Once they finish, they must put it away on it's shelf. During the time it is out...even if they walk away from it...no other child is allowed to touch the work, unless of course the 'owner' child agrees to it. The way most people teach their children or students to share is to rip an item out of the hands of one child and give it to another, feeding him some altruistic bromide. Montessori's reasoning was that without ownership a child could not learn how to share or work cooperatively with others in any meaningful way. So with this system, "sharing" only happens when the owner child gets something out of it(help, companionship,etc.). An experiential enforcement of the trader principle. Kinda tugs at the capitalist heart-strings, don't it?

This argument is interesting. I have heard versions of it from a number of communists and socialists. I had the interesting and uncomfortable experience of living in a commune for a few weeks, which I didn't care for, but serves to demonstrate my point. A group of people that chooses to share resources and work toward their common good can do so in a capitalist society. Such is the case with a commune. You could do the same thing with regard to healthcare or any other social program. In capitalist terms, it would be a not-for-profit health insurance program where everybody paid as much as they were able and used the fund when they needed it. On the other hand, the reverse, as you state honestly, is not true. In a communist society, people are not able to live like capitalists. Even with your fairly benigin outlook, you require people that want to live like we do, to leave. Why is that? Why couldn't we just choose not to participate in your voluntary not for profit healthcare system or any other socialist plan that you dream up? Exile is not voluntary. It is arranged and maintained by initiating force. Which is something which doesn't seem to trouble you, I realize. This leads me to believe that you are not thinking in principle. So to get to a more basal level, why is it so important to you to have everyone else live as you think they ought to? In as abstract a sense as you are able, why not let individuals be free to spend the product of their efforts on whatever they please? Why must other people be given the power to step in and force compliance with their own desires? And lastly, why, if people cannot be trusted to make decisions with regard to their life and property should public officials be trusted?(The only logical answer here to stay consistent is that public officials are not "people" which I would agree to on one of my more cynical days.) As a side note regarding the alleged crisis in healthcare take note of a few facts: -If you are a male in your 30's with reasonable health, you can get basic health insurance to cover emergencies with a high deductable for about $50/month. In the US, there really are not many who cannot afford that. There are quite a few, however, who choose not to afford it. -50% of hospitals revenue comes from medicare/medicaid. Medicare sets prices for individual procedures and requires them to accept medicare patients for that price. This in turn, causes hospitals to charge more with regard to insurance companies and indivdual payers to make up for the loss. So that extravagent $50/month insurance bill would in all likelyhood be significantly less if healthcare was not already heavily socialized.

First, I commend you and your wife on your forethought regrading children. Many seem to have the kids and then realize what is required of them. If at all possible, I recommend looking for a montessori school. At least for preschool(2-6). They are usually cheaper then other private school($500-$1000) and will provide an excellent foundation of critical thought, focus, and interest in learning on which to build. Many, also provide scholorships which will reduce the cost of tuition. As a cautionary note, be very careful in chosing one as the name is not trade marked. You want to look for 'american montessori society' or 'international montessori society' cerified teachers. If at all possible, try reading a good introductory book on the subject to get a better idea of what to look for when you check out schools. Montessori Today by Polk would be a great place to start. If montessori is not available or realistic and this is very dependent on you and your fiance's time constraints, but homeschooling is becoming more and more popular. I just went to a talk by Brad Thompson in which he explained the many benefits. Because of it's increase in popularity, many(even rural) areas have homeschool associations. With the networking aspect, you are able to have other parents mentor a small group of children within their own area of expertise. And you, of course would likewise have to teach thiers to some extent. If you can find a situation like this, it allows social oppurtunities for the children as well as increased resources from which to draw a well rounded education. Resources, that is, for you and your child. This reduces some of the burden from you, as you will not feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of knowledge required of the job. If you truly are limited to public or religious schooling, I very hesitantly recommend the religious. Just try to find the one with the most secular and aristotilan atmosphere. If it is very traditional and focuses on the three R's they will be much better off then at most public schools. I recomend Dr.Peikoff's tapes on a rational curriclum as a basis from which to evaluate the school. One final option is that many states have charter schools which teach differently(some montessori style) and focus on different things(science,etc). Many of them have 5 year waiting lists, so if you go that route, you should probably look at it as soon as you have a child. Hope that helps a bit. Congrats on getting engaged and best of luck. Gordon

Wow...You're pretty smrt. I Don't think I could improve on your answer in any significant way. I just wanted to add regarding the 'look, not look' issue, that as I understand it takes infants some time to develop the ability to focus and visually isolate objects as seperate entities, up and above actual identification.

Hi everyone, I disagree that one should never shrug. There are circumstances where it's appropriate and possibly the only way to improve the circumstance. As an example, several years ago when I was working for someone else(in construction), I was put under a foreman with far less experience and knowledge then myself(he was in a relationship with the daughter of the boss which seemed to be how he got the position). So on jobs he would constantly ask me what we should do with every particualr problem. For about a week, I ran the job for him get more and more irritated that I was making this guy look good. So I decided to shrug(in a small way). He'd ask "what do you think we should do here?" to which I'd respond as sincerely as possible "I dont know...what do you think we should do?". And then we would sit there for 30 minutes 'trying to figure it out'. Short end to the story, the job came to a screeching halt. The boss brouhgt me into his office and asked what was going on out there. I told him he should "ask his foreman". A few weeks later I was one. So in this particular case I was acting directly to help people live dishonestly. It took great restraint to sit there and watch something be done wrong, but it wasn't my responsibility that was being shirked. I wasn't being paid to be a foreman, there was going to be no recognition of my efforts by superiors, and really no positive outcome for me. For me, going on strike, was 'valuable for the context of' my life. Strikes are temporary refusals to work to let another come to a direct understanding of your value to them. Very effective, especially if you know exactly what your value is. Oh, btw, great post megan. Dead-on.

I know it is not exactly what you have in mind as it deals primarily with real estate and investment but here it is. http://www.coggan.com/rich-dad-poor-dad.html I have never played the game but have had it recommended to me a couple times. Might give you some ideas.

That was half of all teachers in new york....sorry for misquoting

Here is a great essay I found that does a great job of debunking the myth of underpaid teachers that the NEA has been perpetuating for years. (references at the bottom) http://www.policyreview.org/apr04/hess.html Some highlights "Teacher pay is actually quite reasonable when considered in context. The average teacher salary in 2001 was $43,300, compared to the average full-time worker salary of $40,100 ... 2002 graduates of journalism and mass-communication programs who were able to land positions earned a median salary of $26,000 if they had a bachelor’s degree and $32,000 if they had a master’s ... the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the average pay per hour for all workers in the “professional specialty” category in 2001 was $27.49, while public secondary school teachers earned $30.48 and elementary teachers $30.52 — or about 10 percent more than the typical professional. ... Most Americans work about 47 weeks a year (with about three weeks of vacation and two weeks of assorted holidays). Teachers, on the other hand, work about 38 weeks a year ... Public educators also receive generous benefits, including “defined-benefit” pensions that do not require any contribution from the teacher. A career teacher, without ever having to contribute a nickel, can normally retire at age 55 and receive close to 70 percent of his or her salary for life ... according to the National Center for Education Statistics, teachers claim to work slightly more than 49 hours a week during the school year, including 38 hours in school, three hours with students, and almost nine hours at home ... the typical workday for nonprofessional workers often stretches from 8:30 to 5:30, or 45 hours a week ... at least 15,000 to 20,000 teachers earn more than $100,000 a year for their teaching duties ... half of all teachers earned more than $91,000 during 2000-01"

I do not have any knowledge about the accuracy of the specific claims in the video, but I would be more surprised to find that they were not true. I have read a few books on Hypatia of Alexandria and a commonly held belief amongst those scholars is that Saint Catherine is a caricature of Hypatia. Rather then an intellectual pagan woman persecuted by christians, Saint Catherine was persecuted for her belief in Cheeses. I can (with some effort) provide references if anyone is interested in research, but it seemed pretty well documented.

You are probably right. Otherwise we would have had a 'bank holiday' in 1987 when Clinton and the most of the rest of the people in office at the time, along with owners of the S & L banks stole the $600,000,000,000. So they print the 600 billion to back up the fraudulent FDIC claim and no one's the wiser. Just don't ask why bread costs $3/ loaf instead of a buck. So now the banks still have no responsibility toward depositors. Instead the government does.

Another issue that bothers me about fractional reserve banking is the status of the depositors. They are the primary funders of a bank, but, as I understand, the bank has no responsibility to repay them when in financial difficulties. If bankrupt, the bank pays their bondholders first, then their security holders second, and their depositors not at all. This happened during the great depression. All of my, and I am certain most peoples great grandparents lost most of their money this way during the "bank holiday" otherwise known as the day our banks stole the majority of the wealth of the American public. They close their doors, empty all of the accounts, reopen the next day and ask for more deposits and start foreclosing on all of the property that belongs partially to all of the people who no longer have cash and partially to the banks. I guess this system would be more acceptable to me if they had a big sign on the door under their name which stated that they had no fiduciary responsiblity to let depositors withdraw the money that they deposit. Kinda like an economic surgeon general's warning. I am not sure what a banks purpose is. It seems like everything they do could be done in a more moral way by an investment house where the money deposited would be called what they really are. Investments. For My part, I keep only what money I need for operating expenses in banks. The rest invested. Why anyone would buy a cd for 1% return is beyond my ability to comprehend.