Commodity money (i.e. a gold standard) is beneficial to long-term, sustainable free trade

"Firing up the printing presses" means creating more money. The federal government and its central bank are entirely unrestrained in their ability to inflate. When they inflate, they expropriate wealth from savers and wage earners and put it into the hands of (1) the government itself, (2) the central bank and its subsidiaries, (3) the various "industrial complexes" that government funds, and (4) the wealthy, who have easier access to credit. This is morally wrong an economically unfeasible in the long run. You misunderstand my premise, though. I'm not talking about money "backed" by gold; I'm talking about commodities AS money. There is a difference. A dollar backed by gold is still subject to manipulation. I'm interested in commodity money in which private banks may issue notes for specified weights of specie, and under which no one would ever be forced to accept any bills. This would be truly "free trade" domestically. The Bretton Woods system was NOT a real gold standard. It was a pseudo-gold standard and all free-market economists predicted its demise well in advance of it actually happening. Bretton Woods was a proto-Keynesian scheme, not free-market oriented. Fiat-money central banking is what causes booms and busts, recessions and depressions to begin with. Fiat-money central banking leads to malivestment and misallocation of capital. Under a commodity-money regime, capital comes from REAL SAVINGS, not from thin air. And as far as "bailing people out so they don't go bankrupt," you say that as if it's a good thing! In reality, people NEED to go bankrupt in order for markets to maintain integrity. Otherwise, you're socializing the risk and privatizing profit -- this leads to moral hazard. Moral hazard, of course, is a primary "benefit" of fiat-money central banking; at least in the minds of the looter central bankers and others who benefit from this larcenous regime. BUT ALMOST NONE OF THIS PERTAINS TO INTERNATIONAL TRADE, WHICH IS SUPPOSED TO BE THE SUBJECT OF THIS DEBATE. This debate is not specifically about a commodity money vs. fiat money, but about how they relate to free international trade. Finally, at the end of the argument, you touch on the subject, but you do it through fallacy. Yes, a "weak dollar" is supposedly good for exports and bad for imports. That is true of most other currency regimes. But the fact is that the U.S. dollar IS the "gold standard" of the world (see Greenspan), for now at least, and thus it is widely accepted even as it depreciates. Our central bankers fire up the printing presses and we extract credit to buy foreign goods, rather than producing goods and services domestically and trading them for foreign goods and services, as would be the case under a free-market, commodity-money system. Final note: There are many anti-Fed conspiracy theorists who don't know what they're talking about. Many of them want the government to have MORE control over the money, whereas I say the best thing about the Fed is its limited degree of independence -- it is a government-sanctioned cartel, though, and that is antithetical to the free market. Ron Paul, however, is in no way a "conspiracy theorist." His monetary views are 100% in line with the Austrian tradition, which is a widely respected school of free-market economic theory. I need to remind you, however, that this debate is supposed to be about commodity money's affect on free global trade.