Polygamy occurs when a man has multiple wives or when a wife has multiple husbands. In other words, polygamy occurs when you have multiple spouses. Regretably, polygamy in this country is punishable by a minimum of five years imprisonment.

George Bush is sending troops to the Middle East in an attempt to spread freedom there, yet in the Middle East men are gives the freedom to marry multiple wives while in the U.S. men are denied the freedom of marrying multiple wives! That is outrageous. If you don't have the freedom to marry multiple wives then what is freedom?

I spoke to a friend Claire about this and she said that you can't have too much freedom because, if there is too much freedom, for instance, you could have the freedom to kill. That is true. But comparing murder to bigamy is a false analogy. When you murder someone, you take away his life without his consent. The victim of the murder is denied the freedom of living. However, in bigamy, suppose I am a man already married to six wives. I go to another woman and tell her, "Would you like to marry me? You'll be my seventh wife." She has the freedom to reject me by saying, "No, get way from me you jerk!" or saying, "Yes please!" I am not coercing the multiple women to marry me. They marry me because they choose to. It is like a firm hiring many accountants. All the accountants consent to being accountants for the firm. The contract that they signed is proof of this, and likewise in a marriage with mulitple wives all the wives would consent by signing marriage contracts. No one is forced to do anything he or she doesn't want to do and everyone's choice is respected. Murder obviously is different. If I were to take Claire's murder argument serious and say that freedom is bad because freedom allows me to murder then we can use this to jusify anything. If I rape a child and someone objects by saying that I went against the child's wishes to not be raped then I could say, "Well, too much freedom is bad because too much freedom allows murder and therefore I don't have to consider the freedom of the child when I rape him and therefore I am justified in raping him." A dictator could torture his citizens and he can justify it by saying, "Too much freedom is bad. Therefore, I don't give my citizens any freedom. I torture them."

Claire then claimed that if you have multiples wives then you won't love each one much. But this assumes that there is a fixed amount of love and an extra woman who marries me will have a smaller slice of the love cake. What may happen though is that variety of women allows a man's love to increase and therefore each individual woman gets more love because the man is constantly replenished by different women all the time.

Where is the efficiency in polygamy? Suppose it is the weekend and there is a household chore to do. Let's suppose my house has an area of 100 square meters. Suppose that each person can clean a house at a rate of 10 square meters per hour. Obviously the more people involved in the cleaning of the house the faster the house is cleaned. This is the same reason why you may like to hire ten bank tellers instead of one or one-hundred policemen or policewomen instead of just one.

In America I assumed there was separation of church and state and that government does not inference with the business of citizens. Clearly this is not the case not only in America but pretty much everywhere else in the world. Religion rules and religion destroys capitalism. In this case it destroys individual rights. We have freedom of religion but when religion is used by those in power to coerce citizens into living their lives a certain way then that is horrible.