Gilligan's Island doesn't make any sense. The millionaire and his wife buy goods from the other castaways with US currency. Shouldn't money be worthless on Gilligan's Island? They don't have the option of going to Fort Knox and cashing it in for gold. And if money isn't backed by gold, it's just paper and ink.
No--wait a second. We got off of the gold standard a long time ago. I guess Gilligan's Island introduced us to the concept of fiat currency. People watched it and thought, "We don't even need Fort Knox. We can just be like Gilligan. The Skipper, too."
But I'm not totally sold on the idea. I guess I'm paranoid. What if people suddenly decide that they want gold, and they don't like paper currency? All of my hundreds will become worthless. I mean, I don't really have much in the way of hundreds. But I don't like the idea of seeing a stack of hundreds and knowing it can't buy anything. That'll ruin a lot of rap videos for me. Just imagine Jay-Z bragging about a stack a hundred dolar bills that aren't worth anything. His song "Money Ain't a Thang" will take on an entirely new meaning.
You know what we should do? We confiscate trillions of dollars in coke, PCP, etc. every year. (I should know. I personally contribute to that.) We should just take all of that down to Fort Knox. Then we can let people know, "Now your money's backed up. We have $20 trillion worth of drugs." And that way, if we ever run into some financial problems, we can just go down to Fort Knox and all get stoned. That's a really good idea. Obama--you should hire me.
So money used to be backed by gold. How did they buy that gold in the first place? They didn't have money. I guess it's a chicken and egg thing. No one really knows.
And then of course, at one point, they just continued printing money without adding more gold. How was that an option? How did they know that was an option? I used to think it was Gilligan's Island--but I did some research, and it turns out that the castaways backed their currency with coconuts.
How did the US and other countries know they could just print more money? Is that the same time they started putting all of those weird things on the back of our bills? Were they just trying to distract us? So we'd think to ourselves, “Oh--there’s no gold. But there’s a triangle with an eye.”