You can buy certificates for gold. That represent a fixed value for gold. You don't physically buy the gold. You could though, it's not impractical because gold is heavy and consumes too much volume. It's impractical because you have to pay for transportation and so one. It's more expensive to buy physical gold as oppose to buying certificates. An ounce of gold is currently worth 1100$ CAD. A brick is millions.
http://www.goldprice.org/gold-price.aspx Ideally the graphs should see a horizontal line, with minor fluctuations representing the actual value of gold. If more people buy Gold it will increase in value. So people are making some money. My uncle trades metals.
When it looks like the price of gold is increasing, it's not. What is really happening is that our currencies are becoming less valuable. We're losing purchasing power. They call this inflation but really most of it is due to a depreciation of our money. Legitimate inflation is caused when a resource or service becomes scarce, supply and demand. The average income is not keeping pace with inflation (it can't by the nature of this system) so everyone is forced to take loans including businesses and even the banks. Anyone who understands what an exponential curve is can see the problem. We're exponentially going into debt and paying interest on it. Including our governments. The FIAT Empire allows a select few business criminals (federal reserve) to print out literally ten times what they have in reserves to the banks to collect interest the banks do the same. Because their reserves increase everyday the amount they lend generally increases exponentially. The second tiere of the scam comes with interest. This system makes us addicted to credit and the interest is funelling money away from the economy. The hidden tax that only benefits the crooks at the top. The American government is seriously at risk of bankrupcty. Most of their money doesn't even come from taxes anymore, it comes from loans they keep taking from the Federal Reserve.
In the past money was essentially gold. The coins were made of gold and the bills were exchangeable for gold. That's what money should be, it represents true wealth. Now if you look at a bill it might say "this is not legal tender". This is because it is no longer backed by gold. Basically 90% of the money we use is counterfeit. It only has value because we all agree to accept it.
The only reason we avoided a total meltdown is because the FED is smart enough to lower interest to next to nothing, and lending is being halted. The problem still exists and it will never go away as long as we're slaves to this FIAT system. It's easilly the biggest and really the only threat to western civilization.
Get rid of the fractional reserve system Then we would enjoy our true value. We're actually more productive than we ever have been. We have more workers putting in longer hours and technology affords us efficiency, we're even more educated. The problem is that we're being robbed blind.
Gold is a safe currency, the amount of it is static and therefore its worth, and it won't get consumed like oil will. But what are you gonna do, keep a tonne of it in your basement?
There are a lot of big ideas in economy - but at the end of the day you're only worth what you can produce. Invent something. 
Oh I know as individuals you have to be productive. As a whole we need to produce something. I believe that they type of economy we have will be influenced by how money holds it's value. Without inflation, hard work will have more merit. I'm talking macro economics. My beef is that people are becoming rich simply by lending money. I understand you need to charge for the cost of operation with flat fees but interest is just pure greed. Not only this but the same people printing the money decide the interest rates. They're not controlled by the government, in fact they dictate to the government what they're going to do. Imagine if a single gas station had a monopoly and not only did they have the complete freedom to decided the sale price of gas but also had the ability to deciding how much mileage every car achieves. The FIAT system is more sophisticated than this but it's just as crooked.
Like you said true wealth is supposed to match productivity. The problem is that our money does not match true wealth. Our economy is based on a massive Cartel. Not only is it not sustainable as a whole but workers are being ripped off and businesses are constantly being torn apart by the dangerous business cycle.
<message edited by Agent Ghost on Jan 25, 2009 17:09>