most of the economist that would espouse your line of thinking would say that gold is deflationary and is bad for the economy. If we had gone through all the productivity gains from automated machinery on the gold standard from the 30s to the 80s it would have almost certainly been a deflationary money as the economic output exceeded 1-2% growth. Just because it has been a SoV for that long doesn't obviously point to a harder money being bad does it?