Defense of usury Author:Jeremy Bentham Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LETTER VI. Mischiefs of the anti-usurious Laws. the preceding Letters, I have ex amined all the modes I can think of in which the restraints, imposed by th... more »e laws against usury, can have been. fancied to be of service. I hope it appears by this time, that there are no ways in which those laws can do any good. But there are se-- veral, in which they can not but do mischief. The first I shall mention, is that of precluding so many people, altogether, from the getting the money they stand in need of, to answer their respective exigencies. Think what a distressdistress it would produce, were the liberty of borrowing denied to every body: denied to those who have such security to offer, as renders the rate of interest, they have to offer, a sufficient inducement, for a man who has money, to trust them with it. 'Just that same sort of distress is produced, by denying that liberty to so many people, whose security, though, if they were permitted to add something to that rate, it would be sufficient, is rendered insufficient by their being denied that liberty. Why the misfortune, of not being possessed of that arbitrarily exacted degree of security, should be made a ground for subjecting a man to a hardship, which is not imposed on those who are free from that misfortune, is more than I can see. To discriminate the former class from the latter, I can see but this one circumstance, viz. that their necessity is greater. This it is by the very supposition: for were it not, they could not be, what they are supposed to be, willing to give more to be relieved from it. In this point of view then, the sole tendency of the law is, to heap distress upon distress. A second mischief is, that of ren dering the terms so much the worse, to a multitude of those, whose circumstances ex...« less