the ascent of money, page-7

Gold and silver have served a useful purpose throughout history because they're just scarce enough to be valuable without being completely out of reach of ordinary people. That aside - the amount in circulation is arbitrary, subject to mining economics. If we did revert to an international gold standard, we would probably strip mine our national parks and pollute our rivers with cyanide to increase our wealth. Countries would be as wealthy as the gold their geography and geology granted them- great for Australia, but the more populous areas of the world may have some cause for complaint. In the middle east perhaps they would use their energy resources to extract trace amounts of gold from seawater. All to no useful end as the more gold extracted merely caused inflation at a global level.

That would be the inevitable outcome of a gold standard in the modern world as I see it. There are other systems that could be devised that didn't require extraction of a rare mineral that would be far less damaging, less arbitrary and discriminatory.