Linking currency value to something like gold or silver makes sense for about five minutes. Any degree of thought or historical perspective will show the idea is absolutely f*cking terrible.
I think the opposite is true. History shows that when American money was gold or even backed by gold (2 different concepts) the value of the dollar was much more stable. History shows that all empires that base their currencies on military might and the printing press are doomed to collapse.
The US is just one country, and the entire history of the US is not even 300 years. There is much to be learned from its history, but its not the entire universe.
There are several problems related to linking your currency to the value of a substance like gold or silver.
The biggest problem is that you have to have some of the shit. What if you have no gold? Obviously the US has gold, but what if you were a country with no gold? Then you have to buy gold. You have to buy...money, in order to have money to buy actual things. How do you pay for it? By selling products that aren't gold to other countries, probably at a huge loss. A comparable situation is what happened with the Eastern Bloc countries like Yugoslavia who had to dump goods in western countries for less than they cost to make just to get non-Soviet currency so they could buy things on the international market that weren't being produced in significant quantities in the Comecon countries. These countries had to make shit that was actually worth something and sell it at a loss to buy shit that wasn't really worth anything so they could trade it for stuff that was, with a generation loss of value at every transaction.
Which beings us to the second problem; gold and silver have little true value. Unless you are building a space rocket or some medical equipment, gold doesn't really have much use. Its rare, kings used to destroy entire countries to get it, but it's...kind of just some dumb shit nobody wants or needs except for it being "valuable". Its like sealed video games, for example. The only reason why gold is worth anything is because people have all decided that it is. When the shit hits the fan and all the economies of the world collapse and there is no reliable electricity or food, do you really think people are going to want gold? Why? What the f*ck for? Are they going to need it for their crowns and scepters and sarcophagi? I don't think so. People will be far more concerned with things like water and milk and plastic resin and all that dumb boring stuff people need to live. Only a really cush society has money to waste on useless crap like precious metals.
And as for stability...man, that one is the stupidest of all. What happens if there is a huge gold mine discovered in Belgium? Now Belgium is instantly the richest country in the world and hyper inflation begins. Basing your economy on some dumb shit God buried in the Earth at the beginning of time is going to lead to some really crazy unpredictable supply and demand issues. You could bankrupt a country by stealing its gold. Likewise, finding gold would make you rich, but finding a LOT of gold would hyper-inflate the local economy to the point where you'd need a 1000lb wheel barrow full of the stuff to buy a house. If you want an example of this happening, read up on the silver mines of Potosi. This town produced so much silver they literally paved a street with it for a festival once. It completely f*cked up economies like Spain and Portugal (which were the major economies of Europe at the time) because of it. You can have more silver than anyone wants or needs.
How about this? How about we base our money on our people's ability to produce goods and services? Like, that's what makes life worth living, right? Is the US a better place than Nepal because we have more gold or because we have more doctors and engineers and farmland and day care facilities and movie studios and automobile manufacturing plants and very little pestilence and slavery and murder? So we come up with a system to place a numerical value on goods and services. Then the value of our goods and services and real estate could be portable and traded on international markets. More importantly, the value of this new system, we'll call it "the dollar" would only go down the drain if the entire worth of the nation went down the drain. It would only decrease when we got stupider and f*cked shit up.
Hm...that seems to be exactly what we're doing...eh? All those crazy supply/demand/inflation things I talked about? They already happened in Europe in China years before the US even existed. Those reasons are why paper money exists in the first place.
If America's currency is decreasing like mad, its probably because the value of the country itself is not worth what it was when compared to the rest of the world. We've run out of countries to invade, we stole all the indian land there is, and all the slaves ran away. We spend an ever increasing portion of our tax revenue on the military and we get nothing out of it but bloodshed and "honor". We are spending less on public schooling but more on collage for who are upper middle class and above. We don't value things that are...valuable in the international market. We don't believe that global warming or evolution or Obama's birth certificate are real, but we think guns and gold will save us from the coming apocalypse when the black and brown people come to steal our food. Our personal debt and Federal debt are in a race to out debt each other and no political force with any power is doing anything to stop it. Frankly, its amazing we can actually buy 90 yen with a dollar these days because mathematically, the dollar shouldn't be worth a broke dick, and our treasury bonds even less. Our dollar isn't worth anything because there is no reason for it to be. The system is working.
If American's want to dollar to be worth more, then they should take some of that time they spend patting themselves on the back for being such brave freedom loving awesome dudes and actually work on making the place something to be proud of in the first place. Pay cash for stuff. Read a f*cking book. Steer your kids towards a real job instead of the military or law or advertising bullshit. Stop wasting money on 911 commemorative coins and take a night school language class. When you want something, PAY FOR IT. Don't steal it from a slave in China, buy it from someone who makes a living wage, preferably someone local. And when you pay for it, don't charge it on your Visa card you know you are going to never pay off, pay cash. If you can't pay cash, save until you can. These habits make our personal economies more stabile, and if they became more popular they would make our national economies more valuable. Trading in all our shit for gold and hiding in the basement isn't going to do anything but kill us.
