Is not credit fiat money of a slightly different sort? Except that it is controlled entirely by the bankers and not by the central government.
It seems that we have a spectrum: either safety and restriction with gold, or danger and flexibility with "fiat currency". You can't have absolute safetywith flexibility, nor absolute flexibility with safety. It's a spectrum.
Our current system works well enough--even if it is vulnerable to general social collapse. But if general social collapse comes, you can be damned sure that our primary worry will be something other than the state of the dollar. Besides, with the one true tyranny of the current system lifted (the lift on the ban of private holding of gold, which came in 1974 or so), there's nothing preventing anyone of you all gold bugs from setting up your private little gold standard. If you don't trust the dollar, go ahead and buy gold and stick it in a safety deposit box and pray for depression. The rest of us will buy blue chip stocks and laugh at you as you stay poor.
"Men's mighty mine machines
Digging in the ground
Stealing rare minerals
Where they can be found
Concrete caves with iron doors
Bury it again
While a starving frightened world
Fills the seas with graves...."
-- The Moody Blues, 1972
(Remember also the parable of the three servants with the talents of gold. Yes, Christ was being morally metaphorical, but it's also good investing advice. Smart guy, that Jesus.)
A dollar saved anytime during the 100 or so years of the gold era retained its purchasing power- you can find some relevant graphs in Friedman and Schwartz's A Monetary History of the United States. Now compare the purchasing power of the dollar, say from 1967 or 1974 to the present- how has the dollar fared in the post Bretton Woods regime? How would you have fared holding your savings in dollar balances over that span of time?