Yes it's wise, if you live in a system like ours, to buy gold and silver as a hedge against hyperinflation (which is likely coming soon enough to justify buying some now), but from my understanding there's no way physical gold and silver can meet the needs of a global economy long term. There just isn't enough of it. If you want to peg the dollar to gold you can. It's worked before. But it's not necessary. We don't have booms and busts because our dollars aren't pegged to gold or because they aren't technically worth the money they're printed on. All that matters is that it's printed by our government (not as debt) and is legal tender for the payment of taxes and all public and private debts.
Unless someone here can explain how "Money Masters" is wrong about all that?
The problem with that logic, is that even if you don't print money at massive rates like we currently are, you WILL eventually hit various points where you either have to reformat your economy, or let it collapse. The fiat system has a limited lifespan by nature. So either you have to adapt it when it gets to a certain point and increase denominations (Think like Japan, where a million Yen is equivalent to like $800 roughly) or you let it collapse and start over periodically.
An asset backed currency on the other hand, has inherit value, and actually GROWS in value. See, the problem is the fact that precious metals intentionally have had their values suppressed. For example, silver is the single most shorted asset on the planet. The amount of naked shorts for silver floating around the market at any given time are roughly 100-200X the amount of actual silver we have available worldwide.
Take out factors like that, and metals like Gold and Silver are infinitely more valuable than they currently are. Likewise, there's a limited supply of both, and there will always be a limited supply. There's only so much Gold and Silver on the planet that can be mined, so by the laws of supply and demand as time goes on, precious metals will only increase in value.
Ergo, by pegging your currency to such assets you insure that you avoid inflation altogether and actually increase the value of your currency over time. This actually results in a phenomenon known as deflation, which is much easier to deal with. Ironically, by just periodically increasing the money supply via printing a limited amount to maintain value.
If you're still worried about precious metal supplies in relation to a new currency, the logical answer would be to just peg the currency to the commodities market in general. The US Commodities market is worth an absurd amount. CME (Chicago Market Exchange) the largest commodities market in the world is worth more than a Quadrillion dollars by itself. Yes, I said Quadrillion, the number after the Trillions. This would provide incentive to improve domestic production of basically everything, from raw materials, to finished products, agriculture, energy, etc. etc.
Honestly, that's probably a better solution in the long run, but a metal backed currency is a good start. Either way, fiat is the least attractive solution no matter how you look at it.
If it's pegged to gold it's not fiat. Paper adds convenience, but paper currency does not equal fiat currency. (If you mess around with definitions, you can argue those points, but most discussion treats fiat as "backed only by faith, not by defined hard assets.")
Being printed by the government isn't material either. Universally accepted standard increments matter. Protection against counterfeit matters, which is the same as saying protection against additional valueless printing. Governments can guarantee those standards, but often fail to do so.
I've been wondering about the whole "paper money is inherently bad" part for some time now.
Paper is not inherently bad. In fact, paper currency was an important part of boasting our country's fledgling economy. Ben Franklin was important in making that happen, and helped Pennsylvania's economy grow by his counterfeit prevention innovations. But if the value of the paper is not guaranteed, it's not stable money. The fed controls the paper and prints money whenever they want, stealing from those of us who work for it.