Actually ... spending money is a lot different from barter. If you're producing honey, you can't directly change that for guns. What stops you? If the gun manu

Actually ... spending money is a lot different from barter. If you're producing honey, you can't directly change that for guns. What stops you? If the gun manufacturer wants honey you can trade. If that direct trade doesn't work you could do some intermediate ones till you got to the gun and that is the same as just issuing money, just more difficult to do. Why do people like bartering so much? Money is a better solution for the same problem. The fundamental concepts are really different ... previously owning $10 bill would mean that your bank stores an equivalent quantity in gold for you. Now $10 just means someone owes the bank $10 ... and it's really a useless piece of paper with an unrealistic value. That's really the reason behind an economic crisis. All money is debt, be it gold or not. All it means for me to have $10 is that society has agreed to give me that amount of goods or services in return for giving it back. It is always a debt, if it is represented in gold, paper or a number in a computer. In the previous model where the bank held $10 worth of gold for your bill if you redeem the bill for the gold what can you do with it now? There are industrial and decorative purposes but for you as an individual, what good does it do? I don't understand these arguments that gold is some kind of one-true-currency. The only thing having a gold standard does is set a fixed monetary policy. The monetary base cannot be expanded as the amount of gold is fixed. But the Fed could set the same policy without having to handle gold. Having the physical metal is just an implementation detail that used to be important but isn't anymore. If it's the monetary policy you don't like fight against that. Putting value in gold also motivates people to go digging around looking for this largely useless metal. That in itself is a drag on the economy as those people could be doing something more productive with their time.