>> Gold is not a commodity; it is real money. Dollars are pieces of paper. How can paper have value?

Gold has value because people say it does and because people believe it does. You can't eat gold, you can't drink it. Dollars are pieces of paper, but people believe it has value, and they say it has value, so you can use it that way. Gold *is* a commodity, just as is salt, and salt used to be a form of money as well.

>> Plus gold has been the only true form of money since the dawn of man.

Where'd you get this bullshit? Bartering existed long before money did, and not all cultures viewed gold as inherently valuable, that's one of the things that separated the Mesoamericans from the invading Europeans. The Europeans viewed gold as a powerful metal, but they just thought it was pretty. Gold as an inherit form of money is primarily an Indo-European concept.

A great example of the value of gold is the view of it is Spain. Spain had a huge gold explosion, but was Spain richer? No, because people were only willing to believe gold was valuable to a point.

Well, the human civilization is at least 80,000 years old, and agriculture began to settle humans 10,000 years ago, and during that time there was pretty much no gold being used by humans. Furthermore, the majority of humans even 6,000 years ago, all the way up until about 3,000 years ago didn't use gold, they were incapable of mining.

The reason the Weimar Republic had a problem is because they printed money to infinity on purpose in order to pay off France. And before you say it, no, the Federal Reserve is not doing this, and if you believe they are, provide a source showing the amount of money in circulation is far greater today than it was 10 years ago. Your view of history obviously came from some genius who believes in Austrian economics.

You're forgetting one important thing: gold is a finite resource, it's not infinite. What happens when there's more value in the world than gold? Well, that's already happened. If you mined all gold in existence, it'd be about half of the value of everything else in the world that exists (that is other items). That's why money is important, it allows you to expand value beyond some finite resource and allows direct control over it. It's why the US ran out of gold at one time and it caused a run on banks and a depression during the 1800s. Gold isn't infallible.

Peter Schiff didn't predict 2008, he was claiming it only after people had predicted it as early as 2003 or in some cases some people even earlier, he's taking credit for the observations of other people.

Austrian economics, like Peter Schiff have been making the same predictions about gold since the 1970s anyway, in fact in 1982, 1988, 1993, and today 2010, gold was supposed to become hugely valuable, more so than any other time, and there was supposed to be a huge panic, but there wasn't any of those years, and I don't believe there will be in 2010.

That's not what caused the great depression, if it was there should have been a great depression after the Vietnam War, because of the massive inflation, but there wasn't. The great depression was caused by various things happening all at once, beginning with the crash of the stock market, a run on banks, and a huge lock down by banks against providing loans and lines of credit.

What got us out of the great depression was primarily manufacturing in line with World War 2, so you're right about that, but back then our money was backed by gold, and that didn't make a bit of difference.

Yes, I do know that the US dollar today has a value much different than it did, but back then it was based on gold, and I already discussed the finiteness of gold. That doesn't mean that people weren't irresponsible before, primarily after the Vietnam War in this case. You also had a shift in the working class of the US which caused inflation, that is going from manufacturing, to service oriented stuff. I don't think that was a good thing either, it's hurt us in more ways than you can imagine and gold could never fix it, you have to actually start building things in America again.