Re: Explain to an idiot the benefits of going back to the Gold standar
You can base it on diamonds or toothpaste if you want. Those things have real value too. If you have paper money, tied to a hard asset, then that's ok. A few decades ago, I think it was US$35 per ounce of gold, and you could trade the paper around, but if you ever wanted to, you could redeem that paper for real gold from the government.
But once we went off the gold standard, you couldn't get gold anymore. All you had was paper, and you have to "trust in god" that the paper is going to have value.
You could easily use other items though. And you can use a lot of them. Maybe gold is $700 an ounce, but silver is $14 an ounce and toothpaste is .35 an ounce. As long as you can convert back and forth, between paper and hard assets, any number of things can be used, as long as those hard assets have actual value.
Obv you wouldn't use toothpaste since the intrinsic value is so low, and the space needed to have a reserve storage would be huge (plus it's perishable), but you get my point. =)
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