we should not have rulers

Explain "should not"?

Besides, in case you haven't noticed, the so-called rule of law only applies to us little folks, not Wall Street banksters, for example.

Life's unfair. Rule of law applies in some sense - if I put my savings in a bank (UK), the government guarantees them even in the event of the bank going bankrupt. Why not apply the law more carefully and thoroughly instead of throwing it away?

The same applies to food. If your food products harm people, no one will want to buy them, and you won't get any money.

You say this as if con-artists and careless people have never hurt anyone ever, and it's just an imaginary situation. Why do we even have the concept of "snake oil" if people aren't tempted to buy things that don't work? Why do people today buy and sell harmful foods that taste nice, and "alternative medicines" that cost a lot and do nothing?

Why do we need environmental regulation stopping companies dumping neurotoxins in local waterways?

If your idea worked, it would already work and there would never have been any need for these laws to be enacted in the first place.

Instead, we got awful unsafe mines and factories, that people died and got mutilated by. After that, people gradually fought for laws to make companies make them safer.

Why do we hear about problems in Foxconn factories? Surely if your idea worked, people would stop buying devices made in Foxconn factories, the factories would make everything hunky dory, and then we wouldn't hear anything. Yet that isn't happening. Why did we have to have laws to stop people smoking in public - why do people smoke at all? Why aren't we all rushing to be first countries to move to nuclear power plants? Why is there such a thing as an obesity epidemic, if people stop buying things that hurt them?

People don't buy harmful things? People won't make harmful things? As if!

Maybe you could argue that it works in a sense... it only took Korean Airways 16 aircraft losses, 700 deaths, thirty years, being kicked out of SkyTeam, having a safety record 17x worse than other companies, a quarter billion dollars per year losses, having a USDoD ban on employees flying with it, and an FAA ban on Korean Air expanding service to the USA, before they started to change their safety practises.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_incidents_and_accide...

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/26/business/new-standards-mea...

Oh wait, thirty years of needlessly killing passengers, but after four months of US Government intervention they sorted things out to be high in the safety rankings, back in the code sharing, have restrictions lifted and be back in profit all in two years? Guess you can't really argue that people wouldn't buy their dangerous service or that the market would make them fix it after all.

Gold was happily used as a currency for ages, without anyone decreeing that it has value. Money just doesn't work that way. Gold was used exactly because everyone wanted it (ie. it had universal value), it was durable, divisible, and so on.

At its highest ever price, all gold ever mined put together would be worth ~8 trillion dollars. The USA GDP is 17 trillion dollars, for the USA alone. (Both Wikipedia). Where are you going to get enough gold to back the entire economy?

"Since the 1950s, annual gold output growth has approximately kept pace with world population growth of around 2x, although far less than world economic growth of some 8x"

There are ~192 countries in the world. How many use a gold standard now? 0.

It was workable a hundred years ago. Now it isn't.

Interesting point about the police.