You're deliberately misrepresenting Ron Paul's position. He's not for a gold standard in the sense of a government currency made of gold having the monopoly. He's for free banking. While I realize that you consider free banking to be as deranged as the gold standard, there is a considerable (though admittedly minority) amount of economists that would disagree with you.
Even a cursory search of the scholarly periodicals available brings up at guys like:
Kam Hon Chu, "Free Banking and Information Asymmetry" Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Nov., 1999), pp. 748-762
"Entry, Rivalry and Free Banking in Antebellum America" The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 72, No. 4 (Nov., 1990), pp. 682-686
Andrew J. Economopoulos [actually the guy's name. "Illinois Free Banking Experience" Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Vol. 20, No. 2 (May, 1988), pp. 249-264
And of course, the most famous one is " New Evidence on the Free Banking Era" by guys called Arthur J. Rolnick and Warren E. Weber in
The American Economic Review, Vol. 73, No. 5 (Dec., 1983), pp. 1080-1091.
Permit me to quote:
"Our preliminary conclusion from this evidence is that it is misleading to characterize the overall free banking experience as a failure of laissez-faire banking."
Now, if anything, free banking would be easier to work today than it was in the 1800's the information networks of today are nothing like the world of telegraph and paper.
More importantly, 'free banking is not 'completely unregulated banking'. The only situation that features that is anarchy. It is quite possible (Sweden, for one, managed it) to have free banking that's overseen by various governments to prevent wildcatting (which, in itself, was actually pretty rare).
So you might disagree with this policy solution, Manedwolf, but it's not 'OMG INSANE' as you like to pretend.