"Wealth, like suffrage, must be considerably distributed to sustain a democratick republic; and hence, whatever draws a considerable proportion of either into a few hands, will destroy it. As power follows wealth, the majority must have wealth or lose power." . . .
Taylor named two threats to the natural economic order, "two modes of invading private property; the first, by which the poor plunder the rich, . . . sudden and violent; the second, by which the rich plunder the poor, slow and legal." The first he dismissed as irrelevant to the American circumstance. Here the poor could not become dangerous until the concentration of wealth greatly increased their number. The real peril, he believed, lay in the second mode: plunder from above, orderly and legalized. The succession privilege orders through history--the priesthood, the nobility, now the banking system--showed how every age had known its own form of institutionalized robbery by a minority operating through the state. Quotes from Taylor's An Inquiry into the Policy and Government of the United States, 1814, in Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson, pp. 22-23
Taylor was a hardcore, principled Jeffersonian dismayed about how the Hamiltonians were winning in the period after the War of 1812--even Jefferson and Madison had caved to the Federalist program. Capitalism was simply a force that could not be resisted. More coming on this theme. I'm interested in understanding better and with as much sympathy as a I can muster, the intellectual, emotional, and mythic roots of the Tea Party, which in large part lie in the thinking of people like Taylor.