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Our currency has not been debased

You have to be kidding. The FRN has lost 96% of its value in the last 90 years.

but the value storage medum has changed from gold to GDP

Stores of value have many necessary characteristics. They must be easily traded. They must represent a means of comparing the relative values of two items. And so on.

How do you trade GDP with someone? How do you represent the value of a commodity, say your car, in terms of GDP?

If we printed more currency than our GDP would allow, we would experience inflation

Which we are. Our fiat currency has inflated by nearly 10,000% over the last 80 years.

To tabilize prices. THAT IS THE ROLE OF THE CENTRAL BANK, IN THIS COUNTRY AS WELL AS OTHERS

Well, they are failing miserably, just like they have failed miserably in every other country and in every other time. We were doing just fine without the Federal Reserve, as prices were stable for 150 years before that monstrosity was illegally established.

All currencies are leveraged and debased these days. If we are pathetic many of our rivals are worse. At least we have that going for ourselves

* Trust in God and family*

Speaking of the fed and "stabilizing currencies," here is one of my favorite quotes:

"If recession should threaten serious consequences for business (as is not indicated at present) there is little doubt that the Federal Reserve System would take steps to ease the money market and so check the movement."

--Harvard Economic Society, October 19, 1929

If the hubris and conceit was thick among the MS intelligentsia in 1929, it's even worse today. An eerie parallel is Bernanke, the ultimate Ivy Leaguer, taking over the Fed in a few weeks.

We were doing just fine without the Federal Reserve, as prices were stable for 150 years before that monstrosity was illegally established.

While I grant that you certainly have a right to your own opinion, please remember that you have no right to force on us your own Bizarro parallel universe.

OK, please forgive my coming on with an exasperated tone, but it doesn't matter that how many times gold bugs say that we had no inflation before the FRB, saying it will never make it true. The worst inflation we ever had was back then and it was even over 20% --for years. What made it even worse was that it would never stay there --without warning it would plummet to double digit deflation --and then back up again.

We're not talking just numbers here. That kind of market environment was pure hell. People starved and died.

We've posted historic inflation data several times on these threads, and often some goldbug will say (again without looking it up) that the wild price fluctuations were only during times of crisis --Civil War, WW I, etc.. That's when we bring out a comparison of the inflation records of the past two decades superimposed on the last 20 years before WW I. Again, before the FRB prices were all over the place then and today's inflation looks well, boring.

Probably whenever a bunch of gold bugs get together it's easy to make up numbers without fear of anyone's scientific honesty getting in the way, but out here in the real world the rest of us are forced to actually look these things up. We need to feed our selves without asking others to pay our bills, and we can't afford to get it wrong.