Your hubris has no bounds. The big difference is, as you say, Hamilton was thinking, new and original thoughts. You might remember him as one of the architects of our country.

But if I ever want a national constitution pasted-together ransom note style out of stale jingoisms, you'll be the first to hear about it.

Essential flame business done...clearly we view money in very different ways. I think of it simply as an abstract symbolic system for converting goods of dissimilar type or time-shifting the abstract value of such goods.

But your use of hyperbolic terms like "counterfeit currency" to describe government-issued money reveals that your view of money isn't quite so objective and dispassionate. You seem to think that money, in addition to having some absolute value tied to the laws of the universe, also has a moral dimension. You think in terms of "good money" and "bad money", judged by origin rather than assay--money obtained via taxation being simply bad money, any use of bad money can only result in bad results, end of story.

So you disapprove of the federal government issuing money, which pretty much leaves us with state-issued or private currency, if we intend to continue using money. That'll be a fascinating experience...much like the early days of the United States. There's a reason we eventually stopped doing that. Sure, tying all those private currencies to gold will fix it, right?

Oh sure. You do realize that gold is a useful substance in its own right, right? It isn't in the periodic table just to act as an anchor for dollars. It's industrially value and highly-valued for its aesthetic properties (shiny metal!) in luxury items like jewelry. And being a useful substance, the demand for it fluctuates, and therefore--you ready for this?--its value (in terms of what people will pay for it any instant in time) fluctuates.

Tying an abstraction whose main utility is that being tied to nothing, it can become anything; to a specific yet uncertain anchor like a market commodity is insane. Why the hell not tie our currency to the price of corn, for chrissakes? Actually makes some sense, since it's been argued that ergs of energy are a useful anchor for a currency, so why not ethanol feed stock? It makes just as much sense in the 21st century as a fetish for a pretty shiny metal. Hey, look over there, silver!

The gold fetish is irrational and tying a currency to it is idiotic.