Freedom is great, but it’s meaningless — indeed, essentially doesn’t exist — if it doesn’t go hand in hand with discipline and meeting basic obligations to others, something we had in the years prior to abandoning the gold standard.
We abandoned the gold standard in '34 to enable the nation to deal with the great depression and to move American industry to a war footing needed to defeat Nazi Germany. Anyone who has a clue about economic history would immediately see the relevance of the gold standard in both those events and the advantage of a sovereign fiat currency in avoiding them in the future.
We only left the Bretton-Woods agreement and the international gold standard when we became a net importing nation. As such, we had no hope of defending our declining gold reserve without a fiat currency that reflected the true economic capacity of our resource-rich nation and its productive population. Returning to any such folly as a gold standard would quickly spell the demise of America as a first-world nation, not just as the dominant economy in the world. We would be forced to sell our natural resources at whatever prices would be set by nations with more abundant gold reserves, one of which is Russia, to afford the imports we have economically adjusted to.
Indeed, today’s inflation springs from deep-rooted problems such as resource scarcities. Also contributing is a shortage of skilled labor, one result of our having neglected basic education. These aren’t problems the Fed can solve, short of engineering a recession. And a recession in the context of massive debt could indeed bring a massive meltdown in its wake.
We don't have complete price control of many goods beyond the upper limit of what they would cost to produce here, but we do have control of what dollars exist in the economy to deploy and purchase them. With a sovereign fiat currency, anything that can be resourced in the private sector, including imports, is "affordable" to the currency-issuing government without consideration of revenue or prior deficit spending.
Upon leaving the gold standard behind as the relic of feudalism it was, the definition of "debt" changed entirely for the currency-issuing federal government. It now simply reflects the number of dollars spent into the private sector to provision the government and fund its programs minus taxation since our nation's founding. It is our "net" money supply that is required to net retire private bank debt or be net saved.
Many economists are now suggesting that the measures most often taken by the Fed to combat inflation, primarily hiking rates to stifle economic growth, are actually inflationary while also greatly contributing to income inequality. Higher rates favor savers and hurt workers by expanding the money supply without benefiting any except bankers and those who make their money with their money. They believe that setting rates at near-zero permanently while using fiscal policy to control inflation gives Congress back control of the economy it was Constitutionally meant to have.
One major horror story would be massive fiat currency printing to obtain whatever commodities the U.S. feels it needs.
Your use of "massive" in relation to spending suggests that your priorities aren't aligned with the best interests of average Americans. Promoting not only the antiquated gold standard, but also the false concept of debt and taxation as "funding" mechanisms for the currency-issuing government reinforces that perception. As we have seen with the current (some say unwarranted) price increases there is little relationship between commodity prices and spending levels, or any evidence that cutting spending/raising rates would do anything except inflict more difficulties upon an already bludgeoned working-class and deprive the economy of necessary products while also securing the income stream of the investment class.
The people are waking up to the reality of mostly unregulated capitalism that is allowed to run rampant and throw tantrums whenever the working class exercises its ability to say no to the wages and conditions being offered. They have bought into the myth of "job creators" and efficient government without receiving any of the foretold benefits and I wouldn't be surprised if a "massive" movement to reinstate important regulation and taxation of unearned income arises to the embarrassment of both neoconservative and neoliberal politicians and their donors.
