Why Gold?
Most people who wished to return to a commodity standard talk about gold. But why? "We have become so accustomed to regarding gold as the natural monetary metal that we have forgotten that silver was a far more important monetary metal than gold for centuries, losing first place only after the 1870s." -- Milton Friedman, Money Mischief , p. 122 And when gold did replace silver, it was due to legislative action, in both the UK and the US. Contra the Richter Report and many other goldbugs, gold became money because the government chose it as money. (Not to say that no market society ever chose gold as money, only that the era of the gold standard was created almost entirely by fiat.) It would be more historically justified to advocate a return to the silver standard if you want the commodity that markets picked.