Political Philosophy

A Defence of Usury

♡+

Jeremy Bentham

1787

Written in a series of letters to Adam Smith — whose Wealth of Nations had otherwise defended economic liberty — Bentham argues that the case for freedom of trade must extend to the market for money. Laws capping interest rates, he contends, harm the very borrowers they claim to protect by driving them to worse alternatives, stifle innovation by denying capital to "projectors," and rest on no coherent utilitarian justification. The work is a model of classical liberal economic argument and anticipates later defences of free financial markets.