Senator John Taylor Believed that States' Rights Were a Tool for Opposing Mercantilism, Subsidies to Corporations Cause an Ocean of Extravagance and Central Banks Cause Economic Gangrene

Perhaps no one more clearly stated the link between states’ rights and opposition to mercantilism than John Taylor, a contemporary of Jefferson’s and a U.S. senator from Virginia. In his book Tyranny Unmasked, Taylor articulated his deep mistrust of Hamilton and what historian F. Thornton Miller calls the “advocates of mercantilist economics.” As Miller writes in his introduction to the 1992 republication of Tyranny Unmasked, Taylor believed that states’ rights were an indispensable tool for opposing mercantilist policies. Indeed, Taylor wrote in his book that British mercantilism was “undoubtedly the best [example] which has ever appeared for extracting money from the people; and commercial restrictions, both upon foreign and domestick commerce, are its most effectual means for accomplishing this object. No equal mode of enriching the party of government, and impoverishing the party of the people, has ever been discovered.” He denounced “protectionist duties, bounties, exclusive privileges, and heavy taxation”—essentially the Hamiltonian/Federalist agenda—as a recipe for economic depression; argued that taxpayer subsidies to corporations would lead to “an ocean of extravagance” that would impoverish the taxpayers; and stated that a government-run central bank would create “economic gangrene.” Taylor “opposed government intervention in the economy and wanted a natural economy, a free market system,” writes Miller, and he also believed that “assertive state rights were necessary to preserve liberty,” particularly economic liberty.

--Thomas J. DiLorenzo, How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, from the Pilgrims to the Present (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004), 74-75.