Eran wrote:I am talking about which commodities emerged spontaneously as currencies, not which arrangements were dictated by governments (at the pressure of whichever group) and imposed by force on the public.
You are talking about the so-called gold standard, are you not? That is an example of an arrangement that was dictated by governments and imposed by force upon the public. The public rarely actually wanted to back their currency with gold, instead preferring inflationary arrangements (which is why there was essentially an annual fight between gold bugs and labor groups who wanted silver). At the time silver was a highly inflationary alternative to gold, before people had really wrapped their heads around the notion of a fiat currency.
There was never some big demand among the public for gold that mean old governments decided out of the blue to quash. The gold standard only got broken after people had been clamoring for decades to break it.
"If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." --William Jennings Bryan, 1896
Seriously, you need to read up on the political history of how the gold standard was arrived at, why it was retained for as long as it lasted, and why alternative systems (like bimetallism) arose.
Then you wouldn't object to freezing the base money supply?
Sure I would, but not for that reason.
The reason is obvious - governments wanted to stop using gold because that allowed them to counterfeit money without limit.
Which is basically absolute bullshit. Governments only went away from gold once everyone kind of came to an agreement that the time for a gold standard was over. Labor groups in the US had wanted an end to the gold standard for--literally--right around a century beforehand. Business finally came around to their point of view once the gold standard started to choke the economy... as it has repeatedly done before.
The only reason the gold standard ended was because no one wanted it. The old defenders of the gold standard--the wealthy capitalists--stopped wanting it because it was getting in their way. Labor wanted rid of it because inflation is good for labor and gold was keeping inflation too low.
Your mythological version where the government came through and--for no sensible reason you can describe--just decided on its own against the wishes of the people to impose some fiat system... is manifestly untrue. It's a highly distorted version of history that, literally, only Austrian economists propose.