“You may want money to be a long term store of value. But most people want currency to facilitate transactions. ...Or invest it into stocks, bonds or other financial instruments that pay a return.”
Wouldn’t need a return if the markets were not manipulated by the fed. There is this thing called “savings”. You should look it up. Most people like savings and not spend hand to mouth or expect to have to be experts in investing in order to keep what they have earned.
If it wasn't for manipulation by the FED, we'd have deflationary depressions every 20 years, just like we had in the 1800's on the gold standard.
Sure if we were linked to a gold standard, you could hold dollars and while the purchasing value of those dollars might swing up or down 20% year to year, but over 100 years, the purchasing value would probably be much higher since enough gold isn't produced to keep up with the supply of goods. But then because of the recurring deflationary depressions you wouldn't have earned as many dollars and probably would have lost the ones you did earn.
In fact if the whole world adopted the golds standard, we'd only have less than 1 oz of gold per person. There's only been a total of 171,000 tons of gold mined in all the world. That equates to 342,000,000 lbs or 5,472,000,000 oz of gold. With over 7 billion people in the world that's just about 2/3 oz per person.
The fact is that gold based deflation is bad for the economy. Gold is subject to manipulation by the Soros's of the world. If you can hold dollars and increase your purchasing power why invest, why take risk? Deflation is horrible for capital markets.
The bankers understand this. Fortunately most of the politicians with the exception of Ron Paul and a few other kooks do too.
So you are just going to have to deal with it. We'll never go back to a gold standard and we'd be stupid if we did. And we'd abandon it quickly for all of the reasons we abandoned it before.