The issues you've highlighted here have to do with out of control population growth which is a world social problem. The whole idea of governments attempting to link currency and population growth is asinine and compounds the problem.
Currency is supposed to be a simple tool to facilitate the trade of goods so that people do not have to barter goods directly. It should be easy to use, easily quantifiable, measurable, easy to valuate FOR EVERYBODY that uses it (including the simple minded ditch digger), and the value of that currency should be easy and reliable to store over time. When you have central banks running printing presses out of control, banks that can magically expand and contract the money supply when it suits their needs through the simple tap of a computer key (and then take a chunk (in the form of interest) of that magically created out of thin air money supply - ie. taking money from the M0 money supply and putting it into its own pockets when they have created nothing), and governments that can change the valuation of its currency against bullshit such as precious metal quantities held by the financial elite (as opposed to setting it against resources that every person trades, needs and uses every day...items such as real property, energy, food, water etc.), then you have a system that is nothing but smoke and mirrors easily manipulated by the powers that rule and completely beyond the understanding of the average person (and thus impossible for them to valuate themselves).
The average person has no way of being able to determine what the true value of their currency holdings is, and storage of that value over time in the form of currency is anything but reliable. And that is just plain criminal.
Currency should be a fixed quantity. Period. If our world runs rampant with problems such as population growth then our governments need to focus on policies that directly determine how our world resources ought to be doled out among the masses - and simplifying the currency system would make tackling these kinds of problems much, much less complex to do.
But simplifying the currency system is not something the financial elite would ever want to do. Why would they? Owning the majority of capital, controlling world resources, and possessing the knowledge and ability to manipulate the world's currencies are the biggest advantages the elite could ever want in the competition of life against the masses. If the value of a currency could be easily determined by the masses then determining strategies to reallocate capital and resources away from the power brokers of our world becomes a much more straight-forward exercise.
(as a side note - as I get older it seems that the more I think about it, the more I truly believe from an ideological point of view that certain forms of usury should be illegal - debt and the taking of money by interest seems to be the root of all evil in this world. I have a whole lot of thoughts on this subject but I'm not going to share them here at this point)
Well, under that argument, we should go back to Gold, Silver and Copper Coins. That's what the world had from 1750 to 1916 and the table shows that in 150 years inflation was just over 100% (5 vs 12.8 normalized to 1974 = 100) What changed was the creation of paper money. Prior to 1916, paper money was usually a stop gap because there weren't enough coins in order to conduct business. After WWI, the British and Americans started to remove / debase coins and wrote laws that limited redemption of currency to those who had enough currency to get a 400 ounce Gold Bar. That made the Gold Standard a "Standard" in name only, so that when the British and Americans officially went off of the Gold Standard - there wasn't a huge public outcry.
The founders of the USA discussed having a coin system where 100 copper pence = 1 Silver pence, 100 Silver pence = 1 Silver Shilling, 100 Silver Shillings = 1 Gold Shilling, etc.. The problem was that America had a shortage of Coin of any denomination and a shortage of metal to make coins. That's why the official American currency for a while was Spanish Silver coins - they were what there was the most of.
The problem with a shortage of coinage, and it wasn't just in America in the 1700s, is that it is the "strong man", the "man with a gun" that owns the land under that system. That's why the "Landed Gentry" in Britain and the push to open up the West in America. American history is full of "Range Wars" and the confiscation of property by the man with a gun. That's why Colt invented the "Peacemaker" Revolver and it's why Americans love their guns. Guns prior to Colt weren't affordable by most citizens.
Ps, the answer to PlayfulAlex's question (in part)
Through most of history, until WWII, Catholics and Protestants couldn't lend money. Only the Jews could. So, what Kings and Princes did is have "Court Jews" that did the lending. When a King or Prince couldn't afford to repay their loan, they just had a Pogram - which cleared those debts from the books and also their other citizen's debts. Pograms were a popular thing.
That's the basis of European antisemitism and why Hitler didn't get all that much of an outcry when he began the organized killing of Jews. All of the outcry against the Holocaust is a post war thing. Britain, Canada and the USA didn't accept Jewish immigrants from Germany in the 1930s despite knowing what Hitler was doing. IBM was selling the Germans the tracking/organization system and Ford was selling the Germans the trucks.
