Will the gold standard have the last laugh?

I found this exchange between David Frum and Robert Murphy helpful in getting a bird's-eye view of the issues with the gold standard.

http://blog.mises.org/archives/007610.asp (The paragraph at the top provides a sequential guide through the exchanges.)

I had always thought that the economy could not grow on the gold standard, but Murphy argues that economic expansion would be accommodated by deflation (i.e., an increase in purchasing power). Gold is now at about $700/oz. I remember that when I was a teenager, or sometime in my distant past (I am now 45), it was at about $35.00/oz. Had I put $70.00 into two ounces back then, that money would be worth$1400.00 now. Under the current monetary system, that $70.00 would be worth what, maybe $20.00? Had I invested that same $70.00 in the stock market, at an average of 8% interest it would be worth $500.00. This is a non-exact calculation, but even if it is close, it suggests that inflation has outpaced the stock market, that purchasing gold would have been a good investment when I was a teenager, and that the government has allowed the value of my money to erode compared to its value had it been tied to gold.

Zimbabwe is undergoing hyperinflation at the hands of its politicians. Those politicians' hands would be tied were its currency subject to a standard immune to their corruption. What kind of inflation will we be subject to in the aftermath of the imploded easy-money housing bubble? Murphy argues that the German hyperinflation that led to Nazism would not have occurred had its economy been tied to the gold standard. Ludwig Von Mises stated in the sixties that Federal economic interventionism leads to "aggressive nationalism" and "economic fascism." I wonder whether our need to be aggressive in the Middle East, and the economic justification of that aggressiveness common among Republicans, is a manifestation of this principle. What have we really come to when we justify military interventionism as a means of rescuing our economy? While such interventionism may seem to be justified, and even "compassionate," as a concession to realism, perhaps it is better conceived as a symptom of a fundamentally flawed monetary system.

I saw the Republican candidates laugh Ron Paul to scorn on stage last night. But I cannot help but wonder whether they are thinking at the Band-Aid level while Paul, the only seriously studied economist in the lot, is thinking at the disease level. This would not be surprising, since he also, to my knowledge, is the only M.D. among them.

I have been putting my money on the stock market for the last decade, or so, and I have not been oblivious to how my gains are being eroded by inflation and that by the time I begin to withdraw in retirement, what now seems to be a lot of money in the future will be worth perhaps a third of its value in real buying power. I wonder: were I to invest in gold instead, would my money be worth three times more than if I keep it in the stock market, as is approximately the case for the last thirty-five years? Probably so. Is there a country these days that is on the gold standard? Perhaps that is where I should hit the job market the next time I am looking.