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Imagine your employer had to cut prices year after year after year. They need to sell more product to pay your wages. They have an incentive to reduce head count. Now your real wages are zero.

In the early 1800's, the Luddites were a social movement that hated and sabotaged textile machinery, because they saw that this new equipment and technology reduced the need for the traditional textile weavers. You are looking at this through this, and the narrow prism of today's debt-delevering deflation of speculative assets, particularly housing. Companies are going bust and prices are dropping because of Bankruptcy. Why did this happen? Because Keynesian's beloved Gov't Programs and Central Bank played with interest rates and money supply to create bubbles in Tech Stocks, then Real Estate, all within 8-10 years

A non fiat currency avoids all this.

You are looking at this through this, and the narrow prism of today's debt-delevering deflation of speculative assets, particularly housing.

I'm looking at this through the prism of, why is your salary the only price exempt from the system wide deflation you imagine would be a good thing?

Because Keynesian's beloved Gov't Programs and Central Bank played with interest rates and money supply to create bubbles in Tech Stocks, then Real Estate, all within 8-10 years

A non fiat currency avoids all this.

You're right, there were no bubbles while we were on a gold/silver standard. No panics. No crashes. No depressions.

A non fiat currency avoids all this.

It is, however, subject to its own issues. A commodity-based currency faces the prospects of someone cornering that commodity. Imagine a diamond- or silver-based currency ... then consider DeBeers or Hughes.

Nature might intervene too. Say someone scores a mother lode of gold, for sake of discussion doubling the world gold reserves - and the whole mine is owned by one person ... that would kinda screw up the economy in a hurry.

In a twist, I'd contend that we don't have so much a fiat currency insofar as the gov't prints money on a whim, we have a debt-based currency which is - as nobody has discussed - the only viable format for the virtual currency which we really have. What money do you have? ah, but how much is physical (presidential portraits included) vs. how much is an IOU in a digital ledger at the bank, which [insert chain of events here] is registered as an IOU to the Federal Reserve? So long as you want to use "plastic" as your practical currency, we MUST carry trillions in debt.

It's a long jump for a currency from virtual IOUs to gold, only to find that's not much more stable either.