Patri Friedman - Polygamy in the Media

Pati Friedman has written - more than once - about the arguments advanced by the TruthBearer.org organization's Founder Mark Henkel. The following description of Patri Friedman was reported in an August 19, 2009, op-ed at Pro-Polygamy.com:

National Polygamy Advocate Mark Henkel's arguments had observably broken through to the Intelligentsia. On November, 28, 2008, renowned libertarian intellectual, Patri Friedman, had specifically written more than once about Henkel's arguments for limited government and laissez faire marital economics. Patri Friedman is the son of academic economist and contributing editor to LIBERTY magazine, David Friedman, and he is the grandson of Nobel Prize winning, free market economist, Milton Friedman. REASON magazine reported in July 2009 how Patri is continuing the Friedman intellectual heritage. Patri Friedman has been published by the CATO Institute and has even received a $500,000 donation from Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, for Friedman’s "Seasteading Institute," a unique experiment for securing libertarian freedom. With such an elite background and set of credentials, Patri Friedman discovered and totally comprehended Mark Henkel's media-reported arguments that the marital socialism of one-man/one-woman incentivizes lazy males not to improve their husband-qualities in the marriage market, thereby depriving many women of decidedly good husbands. Praising what he called Henkel's "great point," Friedman exclaimed to his readers, "What a great argument! Monogamy as marriage marxism, polygamy as competition. Doesn't mean you have to seek multiple partners for yourself - but I buy the case that it's a more libertarian institution." Exactly! Patri Friedman’s "getting it" so exactly is proof that Henkel's argumentation is truly breaking through to the elite intellectual circles.

That August 19, 2009, op-ed cited two different source-locations at which Patri Friedman had made these posts.

1.) Patri Friedman had posted his first piece to his LiveJournal.com account, giving this first post the title, "Polygamy is the next civil rights movement?". He posted a direct quote from the 2006 Newsweek report that had cited Mark Henkel's famous sound-bite (being used in Friedman's title). After the direct quote, Friedman then linked to a March 13, 2008, essay directly written by Mark Henkel, published at the media-distribution site, Pro-Polygamy.com, titled, "Kick Government Out of Marriage, Not Churches". Friedman correctly reported how Henkel's specific essay pointed out, "how government opposition to polygamy is what got government into defining marriage in the first place, and thus why we have these win-lose fights about gay marriage."

2.) Friedman made his second post at the libertarian blog community website, DistributedRepublic.net, titling it, "Polygamy for libertarians: monogamy = marriage marxism?". The post began with a quote made directly by Mark Henkel in a CNS News interview, in which he was explaining the "marriage Marxism" of one-man/one-woman to a politically-conservative audience. Patri Friedman gave an excellent exposition of what he had gleaned from that quote, re-iterating the competitive-incentivization-to-self-improve upon men provided by de-criminalized-polygamy and the anti-competitive-disincentivization-to-self-improve upon men by enforced one-man/one-woman. Friedman made a passing reference to a 1994 book by Robert Wright, "The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology." In that book, Robert Wright had originated an unproven theory or supposition that unmarried low-status males "would" become criminals if society does not re-distribute marry-able women to them through government-enforced one-man/one-woman social(ist) policy. However, quickly moving past Wright's unproven theory, Patri Friedman then wrote against the immorality of such a re-distribution and the anti-competition disincentivization that Wright's theory would attempt to "justify." Rather, Patri Friedman completely "got" Mark Henkel's argument, especially the fact that one does not have to seek polygamy for one's own self to see it either.

Mark Henkel and the TruthBearer.org organization are genuinely grateful to Patri Friedman. It is truly gratifying to see that someone with such a renowned intellectual background and heritage as Patri Friedman would truly "get it" and would re-iterate these arguments so succinctly.