John Taylor on how a republic can “fleece its citizens” just as well as a monarchy (1822)

Taylor was a Jeffersonian Republican and Anti-Federalist who objected to a powerful central government which could impose economic privileges for some, such as tariffs and state subsidised “internal improvements”, on the entire nation. In his book Tyranny Unmasked (1822) he attacked a Congressional Committee established in 1821 which recommended these very things. He extended these specific criticisms into a general treatise on political and economic theory which repays careful reading today. In it he argues that a core feature of the British imperial and monarchical system from which the Americans had seceded was the “policy for transferring property by exclusive privileges, pensions, bounties, monopolies and extravagance” which was “sustained by a conspiracy between the government and those who are enriched by it” in order to “fleec(e) the people”. He saw no difference in this policy of fleecing the people if were done by an aristocratic elite with the assistance of the Crown, or a “capitalist” elite with the assistance of Congress. Given the direction the American Congress was moving in 1822 Taylor believed that a new American “moneyed aristocracy” was well on the way to overturning the gains of the American Revolution and returning to an “oppressive English” system of privilege.