We should return to the gold standard

Rebuttals UnionsI did some research and you're right. In 2013 only 11.3% of the American workers were a member of a union. (1) Nevertheless, the standard rule is still that wages go up over time. See this chart for example: (2)Almost all of the circles are green. This means wages went up, so the buying power of the people earning the wages doesn't go down. Minimum wageThe argument that the real minimum wage went down is pretty weak, because income is very diverse. Only a small section of it went down, and it didn't even go down a lot. Bubbles caused by the FEDIt appeared to me you kept talking about the recessions in the 19th century while we're currently in the 21st century. There were very few recessions in the 20th century, which is a sign that the FED started to learn how to use monetary policy. Wanting to shut down the FED for what happened in the 19th century is like hating the UK, because they didn't want the USA to become independent: it happened so long ago it's no longer relevant. Mining more gold for the gold standardYou're saying we could mine more gold so we can return to the gold standard, but I doubt it's really as simple as that. The current price of gold is $1,146 an ounce. If it was really easy to mine more gold, the costs of mining gold are low. Like only a few dollars an ounce. So firms would mine gold for an easy profit. But this is not happening. Therefore it costs way more to mine gold. Let's say mining gold costs $1,146 an ounce. This is impossible, because you first mine the easy to get gold and once you run out of that you'll continue with gold that's harder to get and costs more to mine. But to keep the math simple, let's ignore that for now. We need 2,340 million ounces before we can go completely back to the gold standard. So it will cost $2,682 billion to mine enough gold. If every of the 321,729,000 Americans (3) would pay the same, they would all have to pay $8,336. That's the price of a simple car. If I was allowed to choose between the gold standard or a car, I'd choose the car. SummaryMy arguments against the gold standard are:1. Central banks don't have the flexibility they need under the gold standard. They need flexibility to keep the inflation under control2. The unstable prices under the gold standard make the financial system unstable3. Returning to the gold standard is very hard. Unless it's clearly superior to our current system we shouldn't even consider is seriously (and I believe the gold standard is inferior to fiat currency) The arguments pro used with the rebuttals: 1. The inflation is more stable under the gold standardThis is false, because the inflation under the gold standard was very unstable while the inflation from the last few years was very stable2. The Roman Empire fell after switching to a fiat currencyThis took about 200 years. If a fiat currency is really so bad the empire should have taken about 20 years to fall3. The FED is badThis was a long topic, but if I balance the pros and cons of the FED I arrive at the conclusion that the cons are far fetched while the pros are abundant4. It's possible to steer the economy with fiscal policyFiscal policy is very slow while central banks can react faster5. The buying power of people who earn the minimum wage went down over timeThis is true, but not only are there probably valid reasons for this (like reducing the dead weight loss) but the minimum wage is also only earned by a fraction of the work force It was very interesting to have my first debate on this site and I'm curious who the voters think was the best debater and why. Sources1) . https://en.wikipedia.org... 2) . http://www.citylab.com...3) . https://en.wikipedia.org...