Money for Nothing

Now that ain't workin' that's the way you do it
Lemme tell ya them guys ain't dumb
Maybe get a blister on your little finger
Maybe get a blister on your thumb
--Dire Straits

The simplest solution to the world's monetary problems is to use weight of precious metal (e.g., grams of gold) in monetary exchange rather than some state-sponsored construct such as dollars, euros, yuan, etc. No exchange rate issues, no figuring out how much metal backs each paper dollar...

If it's so simple, then why don't we do it? Because governments want to debase the currency. By disconnecting a country's currency from the underlying metal, bureaucrats could reduce the currency's value over time (e.g., 1 oz of gold = $20 --> 1 oz of gold = $35 --> 1 oz of gold = $800). To my knowledge, such a process has recurred in every large-scale society without exception in 5,000 yrs of civilized history.

One of the first to write about this phenomenon was Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy. Destutt de Tracy was a French philosopher and economist whose work substantially influenced Thomas Jefferson and other early U.S. liberal thinkers. Jefferson pushed for an English translation of Tracy's Traite de la volonte et de ses effets into what would become A treatise on political economy published in 1817.

Tracy (1817) claimed that the very act of naming currencies was used by the state to divorce the value of the currency from the underlying metallic value itself. This paved the road for government sponsored inflation and monetary debasement.

Smart cookie, that Tracy.

position in gold

References

de Tracy, C.D. (1817). A treatise on political economy. Georgetown: Joseph Milligan.