Proponents of the gold standard also ignore the slightly-less recent past of currency crises in Europe and Asia in the 80s and 90s, all due to fixed currency exchanges (which is basically just a variant of the gold standard, with gold being replaced by whatever basket you're using). The fact that we were able to print our way out of a crisis of confidence is a good thing, because in a gold standard world we couldn't do anything of the sort. A credit freeze would have lasted a lot longer.