Sometimes, funny-money promoters like to dangle the idea that the "gold standard," in U.S. or world history, was a short-lived episode dating from about 1870 to 1914, a period of only forty-four years. I take a rather different viewpoint, that gold (and its adjunct, silver) was the primary basis of monetary affairs around the world for millennia, stretching up to 1971. When we look at the history of monetary arrangements, we find that gold and silver were usually used together, in what I sometimes call the "gold/silver complex." The reality was that silver and gold traded in a tight band...