| There was something called the gold standard. This is a VERY bad idea. If you tie the value of a dollar down to an object all a country who really hates us has to do it dump a ton of that product on the market and we get screwed. VERY VERY bad idea. Also a country has to have enough of this object to be able to convert these slips back into product. Silver certificates you can redeam in silver which makes them worth about 7x their face value. A friend of mine who is a libratarian had this brilliant idea of going back on the gold standard unfortunatly there is a problem... this idea would mean that every bank in the US would have to have enough gold to redeam all the money that is currently saved and in cirulation. Any way, even if there was that much gold all someone would have to do is pump gold to the price of copper and well... At least this is how I understand it.... I also rememebr that controled inflation is a very good thing for the eco since it means stimulated growth... and I don't know enough about that to be much use... could someone fill me in? |