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It looks like others beat me to it, but IMO the gold standard wouldn't work today because there isn't a sufficient amount of bullion in the world.
There are only about 200,000 tons of gold that have ever been mined. This increases by less than 2% per year. Already by the Middle Ages in Europe there was a shortage of monetary metals due to a trade deficit with China and India. Since Roman times, Europe had shipped gold and silver eastward in exchange for luxury goods. By the 1400s, this led to the so-called Great Bullion Famine in which gold was nearly impossible to come by.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bullion_Famine
Without a means of exchange, commerce suffered greatly as people were forced to barter and use other commodities like pepper as currency.
The Great Bullion Famine only came to and end with the discovery of the New World, its plundered gold, and a literal mountain of silver at Potosi which even today accounts for half the silver ever mined.
There are no more Potosi's to be found. As the economy grows faster than the supply of monetary metals, the value of gold and silver would need to grow apace. Already, 1 ounce of gold is worth $2,000 and is completely impractical to spend. How much worse if it was worth $100,000?
There is 10 times as much silver as gold (God's ratio) but even the smaller silver coins would likely be too valuable to spend. Of course, we could create paper substitutes like we used to do. But the increased demand for gold (with built-in deflation) would lead to hoarding and the need for ever larger reserves. And how can we be sure that the gold is really in the government vaults?
The hoarding of monetary metals would crowd out valuable industrial uses. And the high prices would lead to wasteful mining that would destroy the environment and incentivize slave labor (as it did in Soviet Russia).
In a way, the Earth is fortunate. Gold is something that is rare, impossible to create, difficult to extract, perceived as uniquely valuable by nearly all cultures, and otherwise mostly useless. It's the perfect medium of exchange and store of value. Without it, trade might have been nearly impossible in ancient times. And without a store of value, capitalism might have never got off the ground.
But modernity caught up. There just isn't enough gold. WWI saw the end of the gold standard in Europe. Much of Europe's gold ended up in the United States, but even so the U.S. government couldn't keep up the show for long. In 1933, The U.S. government seized all the privately held bullion and didn't let private individuals hold it again until we went off the gold standard.
TLDR; We tried it before and didn't work.
That isn’t true- you can buy 1/10 Oz silver coins pretty easily, which would be worth $2.40, a completely practical amount to spend. And anyways this is about transferable certificates of deposit, aka paper money, which could be issued in denominations of 1/500 Oz or whatever as needed.
Obviously there’s no good answer to the inherent deflationary effect, but in a double(or realistically triple) currency system deflation is probably not the evil it is in a single currency system.
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No it's not. It's $24
Yes, gold not silver. Fixed the oopsy.
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