@CaptainHarley It’s not the government that says money means anything; it’s people. If people didn’t think money was worth anything, they would stop using it. I doubt there are very many people who have gone that far off the grid.
The promise of gold will essentially drag our financial system to a halt. It is completely unwieldy unless people keep on going on using money exactly the same way as they have. If everyone tries to turn in money for gold and if they try to use gold as currency, our lives will be a complete mess. I suspect that people who call for a gold standard simply don’t trust anything they can’t see.
The fact of the matter is that most money in the world these days doesn’t even exist in paper… or on paper. Most money is in bits and bytes stored in the computers of big businesses and that is based on the faith we have in electronic transaction systems. The system only works because people trust that it isn’t all that corrupt or corruptible.
There are a group of people who do thing that big business and government are corrupt and suspect they are cheating us by manipulating the bits and bytes. These are the people, I believe, who call for the gold standard. This is mostly a symbolic call since our economy would crash if we went to the gold standard. I think it is a somewhat dishonest or at the very least, a misleading call, since people are not directly expressing their mistrust of these huge systems. I suspect that it is partly this way because people who call for the gold standard don’t know what they are calling for and how it would work out (or not) in reality. But it’s also dishonest because they aren’t willing to do the hard work to demonstrate that the system is corrupt.
No one is willing to be the forensic accountant to document this. In fact, it’s usually just the opposite. They want to close down the government agency in charge of trying to ferret out dishonesty in the banks. They want to eliminate the Federal Reserve. These two actions would actually dramatically increase corruption in the financial sector, because there would no longer be any checks on the large banks. They would be able to steal money hand over fist without the controlling hand of the Fed and the SEC.