Many of our founding fathers are familiar names, but a few others’ contributions are largely unnoticed and underappreciated. John Taylor of Caroline is one such man.
Modern critics often dismiss the founders’ contributions because they were also slaveholders, which was true of Taylor, though he wrote of it negatively. His goals of freeing and “re-exporting” slaves to Africa to avoid violent revolt might strike modern readers as objectionable, but were fairly progressive for the time. With this context understood, it is most accurate to view Taylor as producing a defense of agrarian democracy.
Joseph Stromberg called Taylor “the philosopher and statesman of agrarianism” and “the most systematic thinker” among Virginia’s planter intellectuals. Jefferson likewise admired his work. Yet Taylor was more than an agrarian spokesman. Taylor developed a sophisticated critique of institutional arrangements and political privileges that encouraged cronyism — a critique that remains surprisingly modern.
Long before Buchanan and Tullock fully articulated the Public Choice school of thought and state capture had its name, Taylor warned that political power would attract organized interests seeking special privileges. Furthermore, in An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States, he argued that “faction” was not primarily caused by differences among people. Instead, it came from government-created opportunities for favored groups to profit through legislation. He also articulated how conflicts are fomented by government-granted economic privileges. These were the result of “mercantilist economic interference.”
Taylor distinguished between wealth earned through production and wealth obtained through political favoritism. One of his most powerful ideas is his distinction between productive and political wealth. This foreshadows Franz Oppenheimer’s observation that there are only two ways of producing wealth: the political and the economic. The former relies on coercion, the latter on value creation. Both Oppenheimer and Taylor would oppose subsidized capital, privileged banks, and government-backed financial interests on moral grounds. But Taylor was ultimately concerned about the fate that would befall the rural, agrarian culture he so loved.
Taylor’s solution to these forms of political gain was not better rulers but less concentrated power. One of the most striking parts of the essay is his assertion that liberty depends on the fragmentation of authority. His views on federalism were clear: power should be divided so thoroughly that no institution could dominate society. Least of all a central bank and a debt-ridden treasury.
Taylor believed public debt was not merely a fiscal issue but a mechanism for creating a politically dependent class. He articulated grave concerns over debt-financed standing armies, which would encourage imperial sentiments, raise tax burdens, and lead to a “paper aristocracy” that grew wealthy through these processes, and that they represented a distinct faction or class, separate from productive agricultural citizens. Once established, he wrote, “it can as easily deprive nations of the right of self-government as it can rob individuals of their property.”
Many believe that class conflict is strictly a Marxist construct. But a long tradition of classical liberals has sounded the alarm over societal rifts that emerge through the processes that Taylor and Oppenheimer warned against. Taylor believed class conflict was generated less by markets than by political privilege. But contrary to Karl Marx, he blamed state privilege, whereas Marx blamed private ownership of the means of production.
While Taylor’s agrarian concerns may belong to a bygone era, his distinction and warning about politically versus productively generated wealth still ring true. The modern administrative state has grown tremendously since the Progressive era and has given rise to numerous politically backed privileges within the American economic landscape. From certificate-of-need regulations in healthcare to protectionist tariffs, Taylor’s warnings have gone largely unheeded.
America’s 250th anniversary is an opportunity to recover forgotten founders and the stories of their lives. The greater opportunity, however, is to rediscover the ideas that made them revolutionary: that commerce and agriculture should be free from government-granted privilege.
If the Founders were willing to pledge to each other their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, then we, as their heirs, should summon the political will to dismantle the institutions and policies that have fostered the very kind of cronyism John Taylor warned against.
Even at 250 years old, it is not too late to do so.
