As you stated Fred, it would indeed be very bad for the economy, but with the degrees of GDP committed to funding government operations and infrastructure today - the spending that cannot politically or economically be changed without great damage - a gold standard would put a stranglehold on all levels of governments' projects and programs. A huge percentage of the work done by civilian industry and services is in government contracts they bid for and won.
Before Nixon finally removed us completely from the gold standard, it was commonplace to have spells of high inflation, often following the reported trends of both hoarding and selling panics in the stock markets and commodities futures markets. It was a time of apparent serious civil unrest as far as the panicky people saw it. But a time of great social progress, in fact.
As a school girl, I saw the news and heard my parents and teachers focus on inflation, inflation, inflation. Nixon started a national media and social crisis propaganda scheme - with the best of intentions - called W.I.N., for Whip Inflation Now. The economy was showing clear signs of spiraling price rises, a speculative panic, the natural opposite of a speculative bubble in intent, but with very broad and dire consequences which would theoretically lead to hyper inflation.
You would see WIN buttons and bumper stickers all over the place. It was meant to rally the populace into teaming up, including small companies and big corporations, to not panic and hoard and speculatively raise prices in anticipation of them rising, regardless. The WIN slogan did not really catch on very well, and Nixon ultimately did the better thing by an executive order to change the dollar to a fiat currency.
With the nearly total conversion of trading and commerce to electronic transactions - even cash sales' deposits and withdrawals are incorporated into this instantaneous credit/debit accounting - a gold standard would drag down the efficiency of the economies of the world, much as if we were to trade in all of our motor vehicles - cars, trucks, trains, ships and planes - for horses, sails and hot air balloons.
