Customer Reviews

Tyranny Unmasked

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Once upon a time, educated Americans could be presumed to be familiar with the writings of the Greeks and, especially, the Romans. This familiarity prepared them for republican citizenship in a way that today's smorgasbord approach to post-secondary education manifestly does not prepare contemporary Americans. Read _Tyranny Unmasked_ for evidence of the first of these assertions: John Taylor of Caroline, self-consciously provincial Virginia planter, foresaw the following 150 years' course in America with great clarity, and he lamented it the whole way. This is a great book by one of America's all-time great political thinkers.

John Taylor of Caroline's " Tyranny Unmasked" is a brilliant analysis of enonomic and political economy in the early 1820's. Taylor points out the injustice and folly of protective tariffs and their effects. He astutely shows how by " protecting" an industry from competition you effectively raise the price of the product and foster a government- business alliance destructive of liberty. He shows how financial interests use tariffs to unfairly gain advantage over other competitors and also how they
attain dominence over the representatives of the people through
their influence. Taylor recommends a Jeffersonian ideal of free trade, low taxes, and an abolition of protective tariffs. Overall a great Jeffersonian read.

John Taylor was a member of the House of Representatives from Virgina. He also wrote "New Views of the Constitution" in 1823 which is a thorough but difficult read (Tayor was an attorney and writes like one). Taylor witnessed trends in the national government that were moving towards weakening the Constitution of states rights and self-determination into the Whig desire for power and centralization that would benefit the northern industrialialists. A Virginian born into the values of Jeffersonian Democracy, his writings forewarned of the coming of what became the Republican party, it's centralized grasp for power, empire building and the loss of personal freedoms subjected to the centralized government and their favored corporations. I wish I could have read such quality volumes in my high school history classes instead of the revisionist history that perpetuated the mythology of the centralized government.

This volume is well worth the read. It is my experience that most of the population will not understand what you learn from them, nor be interested in the conflict that it will awaken within them.

John Taylor of Caroline is one of the most brilliant political philosophers that America has ever produced. This work in particular demonstrates a compelling critique of government interference in economic matters that also demonstrates Taylor's firm grasp of political economy. Above all, this book is an absolute joy to read.

Taylor's Tyranny UnMasked opened my eyes to the difference between where we have gone, and the course our nation's founders sought to follow. I never considered myself a conservative before reading it, and I still do not - today's conservatives are the descendents of the very radicals whose policies Taylor condemns. I do think of myself as the wiser and better for it.

Taylor does a great job of offering his vision of the future, a future in which the free people of the UNited States were dominated by a strong centralized government working to promote some version of the "common good." It is surprising how accurate his vision would be, given he was railing against a subsidy for wagon wheels. What you find in this work it that the logic of doing something for the common good is driven by an unquenchable thirst for more of the same. That he was right is seen in the nation's never-ending move forward to an ever increasing size and role in the lives of individual citizens. Yes, it is difficult to wade through, but it is very informative. Get it and learn about where our government is headed.

John Taylor of Caroline was arguably the best farmer in Virginia during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, carrying out experiments and advocating scientific farming techinques. In addition, he was a sometime politician and constant cultural critic. Tyranny Unmasked argues that the moneyed class in the north and especially in the cities created conditions that would eventually destroy American freedom as conceptualized by Thomas Jefferson: the freedom created by the independent "yeoman farmer" beholden to no higher power for his livelihood. According to Taylor, the emerging finance-oriented capitalist economy developing during this period distorted the "pure" capitalism in which an unmanipulated market provided the best measure of price for goods offered by productive workers. In this work and others, and especially in his uncollected congressional speeches, Taylor rails against the "pecuniary aristocracy" of big financiers that he saw as having undue influence on American laws and policies.

The main caveat I refer to for potential readers has to do with Taylor's advocacy of slavery. Some commentators have justified this advocacy with the typical appeal that southern culture demanded that he support his region's beliefs. While the pressures of social and cultural acceptance were intense, even admirers of Taylor should be disturbed by his (as well as Jefferson's) promotion of a type of American freedom founded not only on denying African Americans any freedom at all but also on horrendous treatment that literally worked many slaves to death and made even those in less oppressive situations live in constant fear.

Taylor was truly a genius in critiqing the society in which he lived but he also supported the continuation of a monstrous blight on American life and identity.