>Please excuse my naiveté, but what is it about mentioning the gold
>standard that gets one branded a "crank"?
Because 1) it imposes a very austere constraint on economic activity, allowing only 1-2% annual nominal growth, 2) it's usually advocated by right-wing government-hating libertarians, 3) experience with it in the 19th century was associated with frequent panics and depressions, 4) people who advocate it are, empirically speaking, quite frequently very weird, with all sorts of anal-retentive hangups.
Doug