An excellent, and simple explanation as to why the Gold Standard doesn't work in a modern economy:

"Beyond the difficulty in transporting, storing, and preventing the debasement of gold, one of the main disadvantages of implementation is that a gold standard would artificially inflate gold's value, increasing the cost of items and industrial processes in which it is used. [3] The total amount of gold that has ever been mined is estimated at about 125,000 tonnes.[4] At the former gold price of around USD $640 per Troy ounce, or around $20,000 per kilogram, the value of this entire planetary stock would be USD $2.5 trillion, which is less than the value of currency circulating. In the U.S. alone, more than $7.3 trillion is in circulation.[5] While there is enough gold to cover the cash circulating in the US (but not the world), proponents of the gold standard expect that money on deposit would also be backed by gold.

Under the gold standard, gold mined at a different rate than the economy grows can produce both inflation, when deposits are discovered and extracted, and deflation when they are mined to exhaustion.[6] In practice, the production of gold has usually trailed economic growth, resulting in periods of severe deflationary pressure, including events during the Great Depression.[3] Finally, using a fixed commodity as a monetary standard gives central banks substantially fewer options with which to respond to economic crises and stimulate economic growth.[7]"

Courtesy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard

And you can't run both the Gold Standard and fiat currency unless you have two currencies - how many of you want to go into a store and see two prices? Prices that should, realistically, change constantly as the fiat currency moves in value compared to teh Gold Standard currency?

Also, for a simple case example of why a floating exchange rate is better than a fixed one, consider my recent post about how Australia suffered minimal economic damage while the rest of south east asia was in meltdown in the late 90's. The floating currency did what it was supposed to do and cushioned the effects and prevented any triggers of meltdowns here. In a global economy, the concept of a fixed currency can only be mainted through artificial means and with an economy the size of the US it is utterly impractical to manage such a thing (not to mention that a failure to manage it correctly at any given moment could cause a collapse).

A gold standard works in a simple, closed economy. It fails in complex economies, it fails with any substantial amount of credit creation, it fails when you are trading with other nations using a floating, fiat currency. It is naive at best to think that it will be of any assistance and downright dangerous at worst because anyone acting as a proponent of such a system has no business attempting to have any responsibility for a national economy, let alone the largest in the world.

What's this guy's major beef with the current system? That the market sets the price? How American...not. It sounds nothing more than the popular "oh we must have a strong currency because a weaker currency is bad" rubbish that most of the populace (in most countries, not just the US) comes out with because they have no concept of economics or trade. They subscribe to the view that "more is better" even though it was the lower Australian dollar for the past decade that has been a significant factor in our superb rate of growth and economic performance and will underpin structural changes in the US (with the weakened dollar) that will grow your exports and import replacements and ultimiately lead to more, and more sustainable growth in the future (although there may be a rather significant correct - read fall - in the share market but that's not a given despite it being reasonably on the cards).