von Mises? Hahaha. Is that a joke? Nobody in economics takes him seriously
It's not about his "authority", but about his arguments.
I guess that Nobel Prize Hayek is also not taken seriously then ?
So is sterling pound. So what? What does that prove? That Silver was used for coins once? You think you can walk into a shop in London back the old days and pay with a silver dollar? The money aspect doesn't come from the metal it comes from the authority of the issuer
Of course gold and silver was used as money !
The "authority" you talk about was just a certification of the amount and purity of the coins.
http://www.jmbullion.com/guide/history/From 1785 until 1861, in the relatively early years of the country, the US based their financial structure on currency that utilized gold and silver. Instead of the paper that is used today, coins made of pure gold and silver were traded in the free market. If it was not for financial crises in 1857, it is more than likely that this system would have endured for much longer than it did.
Executive Order 6102 is a case that many mistake as being the Gold Standard itself. In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt enacted Executive Order 6102, which stated that citizens were not to own their own stock piles of monetary gold. All gold was to be turned into the government, with the owners receiving $20.67 per ounce in compensation. The primary outcome of this event was a sharp increase in the price of gold, as it would rise to $35 per ounce shortly thereafter.