Proponents of the gold standard, at heart, simply does not trust the authorities to set fiat policies. Sometimes, that's a correct assessment (ala, Venezuela). But in the US, and other developed countries, the central banks are fairly transparent, and at least tries to keep to their mandates.
The truth is that these countries suffer from structural problems like food imports and petroleum exports that have dropped in value. If they were able to produce their necessities on their own they wouldn't be such problematic countries.
Which is why we don't have a gold/silver economy, but we do have a property and land economy which has taken its place.
These "investments" are based on a pile of almost-free fiat government IOUs. They have been converted into equally imaginary tangible value. You happen to be able to live in this store of value if you choose to, but at the high end hardly anyone does.
It's a form of imaginative arbitrage for high end abstract markets, just like gold/silver, cowrie shells, and big round rocks are. (And BTC, in its own way.)
Which is why at the high end economics is almost entirely faith-based. Fundamental use value is swamped almost instantly by an imaginary tradable value. And that is based entirely on faith in the stability and potential of the investment of your choice.
The consumer market is different because prices - including rentals - have some relationship to scarcity and use value. But there's still a large element which is faith-driven and subject to an irrational boom/bust cycle as faith and hope waver - partly driven by central bank and government signalling about future outcomes.
Can someone elaborate on why this is false? Archeologists have found precious metal coinage going back to the dawn of civilization.
like suppose one person has more grain than they need. everyone else is starving, but they have nothing to trade for grain. if the grain person agrees to let the other villagers have grain now in exchange for the promise of an ox next year, they have in a sense expanded the money supply. this type of arrangement can be implicit and difficult to track. maybe there was no explicit promise of an ox, but an unspoken understanding that a favor would be owed in the future. it still has the effect of expanding the money supply without digging rare metals out of the ground.
They are not the same, but speaking about them at a high level abstraction allows one to pretend that there was some continuous system in place that was abruptly overturned in recent times, for ostensibly nefarious reasons.