Getting back to the gold standard - Portfolio Insights by Brett Arends - MarketWatch

From marketwatch.com, the author writes...

Many people will think of the gold standard as a relic of a bygone era,
something as old-fashioned as bow-ties and stuffed animals. (My caveat:
To me, that's not an insult.) Grant, when we met, argued the reverse. He
says paper currencies and our current monetary system are the ones that
are out of date.
"The anachronism is today's system," he says. We have a "command and
control, top down" system whereby the Federal Reserve imposes an
interest rate on society. The Fed, in other words, tells us what the
price of money should be. It is, Grant says, oddly at odds with the
modern age. "We live in a world of collaborative social networks" of the
Internet and Facebook, of Wikipedia instead of the old World Book, and
so on. And yet when it comes to the price of money, we wait for a
committee that sits in private to tell us what it should be.
This, he argues, is the cause of so many of our ills. The Fed has moved
from "central banking" to "central planning," fueling bubbles,
encouraging risks, and generally upsetting the equilibrium of the economy.
It's a good critique.