Mark David Ledbetter > Quotes

“Every major war in American history, except the Mexican and Spanish-American, has either led to central banking or resulted from it. Central banking and government have a symbiotic relationship that is often mediated by war. Central banking gives government a way to tap the productive power of the private sector and borrow from the future without the need to rely overmuch on unpopular tax increases. Government gives central banking the extreme profits that derive from immense borrowing to finance wars and other government projects.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture

“So exalted was the idea of hegemony over self that every gentleman fell short. But the ideal itself was pursued for many generations. At its best it created a true nobility of character in Virginia gentlemen such as George Washington, Robert E. Lee, and George Marshall. The popular images of these men are not historical myths. The more one learns of them, the greater one’s respect becomes. Their character was the product of a cultural idea.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part One: Foundations

“A regulated society is always paradise for lawyers - lawyers and bureaucrats.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Three: A Progressive Empire

“Any people anywhere have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right, a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Later, when such rising-up and shaking-off threatened his own Hamiltonian agenda, Lincoln’s thinking would change.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture

“In the 20th century, it became more and more the norm for judges to incorrectly instruct juries that they must consider only the facts of the case and whether the defendant was guilty of breaking a law – not judge the law itself. Still, Jury Nullification survived, barely, much diminished, in prohibition cases, anti-Vietnam War cases, civil rights cases (Martin Luther King, for example, quoted St. Augustine in saying an unjust law is no law at all), and drug cases. Only now is there a small but growing movement to revive public knowledge of this essential right.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part One: Foundations

“(*Liberalism then, unlike now, stood for small government, low taxes, free trade, and anti-militarism.)”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Three: A Progressive Empire

“For fear of upsetting Hitler, Roosevelt refused to allow Jewish immigration into America. He turned back a ship called the St. Louis filled with Jewish refugees, guaranteeing death for many of them. Roosevelt also refused to allow 20,000 Jewish orphans into America even though they all had sponsoring families through Jewish, Catholic, and Quaker aid organizations. Virtually all eventually died in Nazi death camps. Roosevelt’s refusal, according to historian Thomas Fleming, was the act that convinced Hitler that the world would not care if he pursued his final solution. And yet all that is easily brushed aside when historians judge Roosevelt to be a great president. Much is forgiven activist, big government”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture

“The Panic of 1819 sounded a wakeup call to some that the founders had been right after all in separating State and Commerce. Having experienced both state religion and state mercantilism under the British, the founders recognized the importance of separating the three power centers of Commerce, Church, and State. Commerce or Church, combined with State, produced both corruption and power too great to oppose – a condition of tyranny.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture

“In real wars, the civilian often suffers unspeakably. But in business wars? The civilian - called in this case the consumer - is almost always the recipient of great rewards, as giving the consumer what he wants is precisely what determines success in business wars. Rockefeller understood this. In fact, this was an explicit goal of his. It didn't have to be.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Three: A Progressive Empire

“The right conserves, so we need the right. But conservation, when dominant, conserves whatever bigotries are embedded in society. The left transforms, so we need the left. But transformation, when dominant, dismantles what works in pursuit of utopian phantasms.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, Systemic Wokism in America: Its Long History and Puritan Roots

“If you fight a war, you will likely come out of it with a bigger more powerful government than you had going in. Militarism can only strengthen the systems of graft which are already natural to government.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Three: A Progressive Empire

“They would, of course, use their new power only for the good. But power is insidious. It does not do what you want or expect, or stay only where it has been applied. It seeps into dark cracks and corners. It is pursued by those who should not have it; it turns even those who appear able to wield it for the good into something more sinister than they were before.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, Globocop: How America Sold Its Soul and Lost Its Way

“Classical liberals had no horse in this race. Or rather, they had a divided horse. Democrats represented them with free trade and anti-imperialism; Republicans represented them with the gold standard. Bimetallism (i.e. inflationist monetary policy), free trade (i.e. low tariffs), and anti-imperialism were the Democrats’ core issues, countered by the Republicans’ gold standard (hard money), protectionism (high tariffs, though also reciprocity), and imperialism.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Three: A Progressive Empire

“Teaching that the poor are held down by a “strategy of class control” only teaches the poor that they must rely on government rather than themselves for improvement. This robs them of their greatest tools for escaping poverty in a free or relatively free society: hard study, hard work, thrift, and determination.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Three: A Progressive Empire

“Supporters of the war will be patriotic, those against it, unpatriotic. And the enemy will be demonized while the enemy's victims will be made  martyrs.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Three: A Progressive Empire

“The American Republic invites nobody to come. We will keep out nobody. Arrivals will suffer no disadvantages as aliens. But they can expect no advantages either. Native-born and foreign-born face equal opportunities. What happens to them depends entirely on their individual ability and exertions, and on good fortune.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Three: A Progressive Empire

“Lincoln, Wilson, and Roosevelt, the three great war presidents in American history, have always been and still are the heroes even of those liberals who profess they support peace.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Three: A Progressive Empire

“What happens within government institutions also happens within those private institutions which are protected by government. The UP could continue to get away with its gross inefficiencies and the resultant social damage because it was protected from bankruptcy. It was too big to fail, just like our modern banks, financial institutions, and carmakers. Health and education, too, suffer from the gross and costly inefficiencies inevitable to bureaucracies beholden to political rather than market forces.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Three: A Progressive Empire

“Just like money, we take writing for granted. Everybody reads and writes. No big deal. Actually, though, only a few hundred of the six thousand languages of the world have a commonly used writing system. A”
― Mark David Ledbetter, Language. A Window On the Mind

“Yes, juries clearly have the power, but history shows they also have the right and duty, no matter what the legal profession claims. Jury Nullification has long been a critical last defense against authoritarianism. It has a history of blocking the arbitrary power of the state and turning society in the direction of freedom.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture

“We find ourselves once more at the precipice. The fate of the Great American Experiment, even the Enlightenment Project itself, may hang in the balance. History should help hold the balance, but it has let us down. A utopian intelligentsia has wiped the American story clean of classical liberal understandings, leaving the pages blank for their evangelical rewriting onto them of a venomous counter-Enlightenment narrative.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, An Imperial Diadem: America in World War Two, World War Two in History

“Careful readers of earlier volumes will have noticed that Hamilton, Clay, and Lincoln – the godfathers of crony capitalism in America – come off looking quite good as people, even if their political solutions don’t.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Three: A Progressive Empire

“And of all those English words, the most dominant, the most powerful, the most amazing has to be... Okay. As a language person, with interest in all language and direct contact with many, including some quite obscure languages, I have yet to discover a language that has not taken “okay” for itself.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, Language. A Window On the Mind

“This could not be accepted. Four of those states – Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas - joined the Confederacy. For good measure, so did the southern Indian tribes now in Oklahoma.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture

“As Vattel had warned Grotius, a nation must never engage in offensive war, no matter how heinous the crimes of a foreign government. The reason? War is war. No matter how nobly stated, reasons in the end become only pretexts for the expansion of national glory and power.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Three: A Progressive Empire

“So I’m with the long line of mystical philosophers on the inaccessibility of reality to the rational mind, and I’m even with them on the idea that none of those billions of shifting versions of reality is even close to real reality, warped as our perceptions are by biological parameters, genetic proclivities, social training, and individual experience.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, Grotius Rises

“Though forgotten in modern America, what followed calls to mind the worst of the genocidal massacres of the Indian wars. The American army killed over 800 Moros, men, women, and children trapped at the bottom of the crater, leaving only six survivors.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Three: A Progressive Empire

“But fiat money is paper backed by no positive value, only the negative value of government threat: accept it or else. Fiat money is the leading cause of both inflation and the boom-and-bust cycles commonly attributed to the free market. Fiat money is the modern key to government power, including the ultimate power of making war. The American debate for most of its history has been about government power so fiat money, until acceptance of power was finally achieved, was always an important political issue, an important part of America’s forgotten history.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part One: Foundations

“President Cleveland vetoed over 500 bills. It's safe to assume that most were vetoed because they involved spending or involved the federal government in an activity not enumerated by the Constitution. His most famous veto involved both.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Three: A Progressive Empire

“Once war is decided on, interests who see advantage in war - mostly business interests - must flock to Washington and "hasten to further" the war. This also is a virtually an absolute principle for any nation populated by humans rather than angels. War, as James Madison warned, will bring a growth in government and bring "interests" into government.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Three: A Progressive Empire