Scientist had kept trying to measure the speed of light, and they kept being dumbfounded.
You see, when we measure the speed of something, we have to measure that speed relative to something else. The speed of your car is measured relative to the surface of the earth. If you are riding on a train traveling 100mph, and you shoot a bullet forward 500mph, than relative to the train, the bullet will travel 500mph. But relative to the earth, it will travel 600mph - the speed of the train + the speed of the bullet.
The speed of light, however, is different. If the train traveling 100mph turns on its headlights, one might expect the light to be traveling the speed of light + 100mph. Like the bullet. But alas, this is not the case.
No matter what the frame of reference the scientists of young Einstein's day measured the speed of light against, it always traveled the same speed - approximately 186,000 miles per second.
So, if light were a bullet, and we fired it in the same direction as the train is moving, it would not move, relative to the earth, the speed of the train (100mph) + (the speed of light (186,000mps). It would just be traveling at 186,000mps. Light is always measured traveling at the same constant speed, no matter what you measure it against.
This, of course, was baffling. Light appeared to defy the laws of motion. And no matter what they came up with, scientists could not solve the problem. Until Einstein came along.
Einstein was the only one who had enough of an open mind to accept the unorthodox solution to the problem. If the speed of light is constant in all inertial frames, then space and time itself, must be relative. Indeed, even mass is relative.
This led to an astounding discovery. If one travels faster through space, for the speed of light to remain constant, the passage of time must slow down for that object. In a sense, time must be flexible to accommodate the constancy of the speed of light.
If us earthlings sent a space ship to a far away star, the faster that ship went, relative to the Earth, the slower time would appear to pass on the ship, relative to Earth. As a result, we would not only be sending that ship further into space, but further and faster into the future.
A decent way to understand this is that we are all traveling through time. We are traveling into the future. But with Einstein's discovery, we now know that the rate at which we travel into the future is elastic. And the faster we travel through space, the faster we travel into the future.
This means that we could build a spaceship that would travel at extremely high speeds, and what would be only 3 years of travel for the occupants of the ship, could be 20,000 years for those of us left on Earth.
So while nothing in Einstein's principle of relativity allows traveling backwards in time, it very conclusively allows traveling into the future at very high rates relative to Earthlings.
This would allow us to, say, build an ark of sorts, with seeds of millions of species, and send it on a high speed trip around the galaxy, only to return when Earth has recovered from some mass extinction event.
I'm sharing this because it is an important tale about the power of orthodox thinking in preventing the solving of problems.
Einstein literally had to pull the rug on our notions of time and space to account for a practical physics problem. I believe our economic problems are quite similar.
And just as with the speed of light problem in Einstein's day, the orthodox solution to our economic problems will fail. We live in the richest nation on Earth in terms of real wealth. We have an abundance of natural resources, human capital, and intellectual capital. We could, starting tomorrow, begin building the greatest, most sustainable, most compassionate and just civilization the world has ever known.
But we can't afford it?
As I've said before, money is only a symbol, a tool used to represent real wealth. And under our constitution, it is the sole authority of Congress to create money for the purpose of trade of those goods and services. Yet Congress, with the signature of Woodrow Wilson, gave that authority, in no small part, to a cartel of private bankers.
As a result, since 1913, whenever the economy has grown, and new money was needed to keep up, instead of just printing that money to accommodate, our government has in fact had to borrow it with interest. And we wonder why we are the biggest debtor nation on Earth.
It is Congress's job to make sure there is enough currency in the system to facilitate trade and keep our people at work.
How can we not afford to build the greatest infrastructure, the greatest schools, the greatest health care system, and the greenest civilization, when we have such an abundance of everything we need to do these tasks?
Our economic system is retarded. I mean that in the literal sense of the word. It can't keep up. And monetary policy is central to that retardation. Our government has the full authority to create money out of thin air, interest free, to finance the rebuilding of our civilization. Instead, we have allowed ourselves to become slaves to the banker's debt.
The orthodox "solution" is to continue to allow private individuals and foreign governments to finance our endeavors, with interest we can't afford, and keep the parasite class in charge of our economy.
The real solution is to use the instruments of our democracy to reclaim our economic future, and begin the business of rebuilding our country.
We need a new, debt free, legal tender currency, much like Abraham Lincoln's Greenbacks, to finance reconstruction and greening. This currency would only be backed by the US federal government. Since the issuance of this currency would be proportional only to the amount of good, services, and real wealth it creates, it would not be inflationary.
While this may sound unorthodox, radical even to the generations of Americans who have known no other system, it is really just the restoration of the general system we had for almost the first 150 years of our nation's history - minus the gold standard.
The overwhelming majority of Americans have no idea how money is created as debt to private bankers. Or how the Federal reserve is neither federal or a reserve. It is a privately owned, central bank.
Many of our greatest presidents, and most of the Founders, were adamantly opposed to a central bank. Wise men? Or commie radicals
If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks...will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.... The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.... The modern theory of the perpetuation of debt has drenched the earth with blood, and crushed its inhabitants under burdens ever accumulating. -Thomas Jefferson
History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance. -James Madison
If congress has the right under the Constitution to issue paper money, it was given them to use themselves, not to be delegated to individuals or corporations. -Andrew Jackson
The Government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credits needed to satisfy the spending power of the Government and the buying power of consumers. By the adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity. -Abraham Lincoln
Issue of currency should be lodged with the government and be protected from domination by Wall Street. We are opposed to...provisions [which] would place our currency and credit system in private hands. - Theodore Roosevelt
The real truth of the matter is,as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson... -Franklin D. Roosevelt (in a letter to Colonel House, dated November 21, 1933)
Of course, despite all this wisdom, the bankers eventually won. And we may have a better chance of building a spaceship to travel to a time when we have figured out how to run an economy before we purge them once and for all.
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