I thought a small percentage of money was created by the government (about 3% - which is the cash we all use)? But I still don't understand the inherent value of gold or silver compared to say property or oil or a famous painting even.
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You say you cant see the value in gold but you can in a painting. What give a painting inherent value? it's not shiny it's just a little bit of wood, canvas and a couple of bucks worth of paint?
Well, I said that gold is shiny (i.e., has some aesthetic merit)! You could say there is extra value in painting through - while there is no obvious utility, there is also the human labour, the huge amount of training an artist might have put in, the emotions it elicits, the place of that painting in the history of art and with human progress as a whole, etc. Granted, I remember watching an interesting bbc 4 program - probably on youtube somewhere - on how people investing in art is actually ruining the artworld - and there might be something of a bubble in the ridiculous prices these artworks fetch.
You can say the same thing about gold my friend, it's not just collected by people going on a stroll. It has a massive industry to produce it, it's not for free.
Yeah, I kind of get that, but it is still fundamentally a transferred subjective value, compared to the utility of say life-giving, or energy-giving resources like water or oil.
Anyway, that all said I do agree that there is probably some kind of reckoning coming (or to put it in less biblical language, a correction). I think that's more to do with the failure of government to deal with the issues of deregulated financial markets selling toxic debt, rather than the lack of a gold standard though. But as I said, I have a limited understanding.
I understand your confusion. But think of money, whatever it might be shells, wheat, metals, paper, hash functions, as a technology. Like farming, writing, medicine etc money is one of the core features of human development. The utility value derives from it being a good money medium