The one thing that makes me highly suspect of any sort of gold standard money is that when times are bad people talk about them and how great they are, but when times are good the rhetoric dies down and everyone happily cashes their dividend checks and buys Maple leafs..
I want to say I think both systems are flawed and imperfect.
My nod goes to TJ. He did hit on something that perhaps only someone who was not raised on the religion of business and finance would see. I have a science background, and a fairly wide one at that. I believe it allows me to see the big picture, where as some of my business major friends seemingly never left the main business building and have a narrower view of existence. Our present economic system is built on consumerism--taking raw materials, creating a product (or service) and then selling to a market.
Growth requires you to find new markets to sell to. But here's were it gets fuzzy. This third rock from the sun is nearing a breaking point on the amount of human population it can support. We need food, land to grow on that does not suffer from topsoil erosion, we need petroleum for fertilizer and pesticides (see Agricultural Miracle of the 50's/60's), fresh water and of course, other raw materials for our daily needs. Eventually, fate (can't believe I used that word) will catch up to us as our numbers continue to grow. I don't believe continued growth is physically possible. I will leave you with an illustrative experiment I witnessed years ago, from a macrobiology course (?):
Take a cup, place some organic matter in it (resources). Allow the mold to grow and feed on the resources within their 'contained world.' Finally, watch the mold die off as all of the resources are exhausted. Just ponder that for a moment.
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