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[Review Of The Book Social Security: A Critique Of Radical Proposals], Gary S. Fields
[Review Of The Book Social Security: A Critique Of Radical Proposals], Gary S. Fields
Gary S Fields
[Excerpt] This book consists of six essays on Social Security. Charles Meyer leads off with a survey of the history of Social Security, its funding problems, and a radical reform proposal by Peter Ferrara to phase out the system. The remaining essays address various features of Social Security.
Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, And Civic Identity In Colonizing English America, 1580–1865. By Christopher Tomlins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. Xvi, 617. $115.00, Cloth; $36.99, Paper., Joshua L. Rosenbloom
Joshua L. Rosenbloom
For proponents of institutional economics, laws are one of the humanly devised constraints that structure human interactions. Like other formal and informal constraints, they define the incentive structure of societies and economies. In Freedom Bound, Christopher Tomlins subtly shifts the emphasis, suggesting that we think of laws not simply as constraints but as a “technology” that provides “. . . a means by which designs, structures, institutions might be imagined, created, implemented, andimplanted” (p. 506). Viewed as technology, legal thought is both a tool enabling action and a constraint, channeling that action in specific directions.