In your time in the mines, how much gold did you personally accumulate? My guess is none, or close to it. The gold standard economy rewarded those who managed to accumulate gold, in spite of it being a mostly useless commodity. That advantage to the wealthy was retained in the myriad accounting subterfuges imbedded in our monetary system and Federal Reserve.

Public money was responsible for the New Deal and the somewhat closer to equality in earning power it gave to the working class until neoliberalism became the standard in the '70s. Selling the plebes on the "household budget" concept was a rather easy task since it is how they relate to money as "users" of the currency. Even so, it represents the single largest piece of propaganda in history, signed on by media and acadamia enmass.