You hear people like Ron Paul constantly moaning about the good ol' days when we had a gold standard. The reason for this is not that gold is pretty or magical or any better than counterfeit-resistant pieces of paper; the reason is simply that no matter how much they may want to, government cannot create any more gold.
Of course, if we could trust our government, there would be no need to rely on the finite nature of atoms to keep the purchasing power of our currency constant.
Though the United States had been shying away from the gold standard since the early 1900's, it wasn't until 1971 that Nixon took us completely off it. This basically meant the government was now given free reign over the purchasing power of our currency. Let's take a look at the result of that experiment:
Occupation: Daniel is Medical Resident from the southwest US. Prior to medicine, he worked in IT as a consultant, programmer, web designer/developer, and technician.
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