John Taylor of Caroline

JOSEPH R. STROMBERG is a historian whose research is both intense and wide. He tells it like it was. At the same time, he gives us a broad historical sense of what the history means for our own times. And not in any trendy or superficial way. John Taylor of Caroline County, Virginia, is arguably the most brilliant political thinker in the American experience. Writing in the earliest decades of the U.S. government, he clearly defined the Constitutional distortions and economic chicanery that were already laying the foundations of tyranny. Taylor saw our future: crony capitalism, judicial tyranny, limitless Presidential power, imperial government interfering with private society and foreign lands, taxation, catastrophic debt of a government that operates by shifting costs to future generations, bought Congressmen and bureaucrats. Herein, a model historian gives us the definitive treatment of a very important subject.