USA and Canada can't go bankrupt - nor can the UK.

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This betrays a failure to understand how monetarist and fiscal policy intersect.

First, we have to assume that the OP is referring to the Governments of the US, Canada or the UK, rather than the aggregate national economies. (Though both, of course, can be analysed.)

The definition of bankruptcy is a financial position in which the bankrupt is unable to meet its current obligations. You can owe $1M and only have assets of $100K, but you are not bankrupt for that reason alone. You can owe $1M and have assets of $10M and still wind up bankrupt if you have no income with which to meet the obligations of your debt as they come due (although liquidation of your assets will, presumably, allow you to eradicate your debt).

Can government wind up in a circumstance where it's revenues are insufficient to meet its obligations? Most assuredly. It is an unusual situation, but it can occur. Monetarist intervention to remedy this (by issuing more dollars) is a shortsighted way to remedy this. By increasing the money supply, simple supply/demand analysis demonstrates that the value of the currency will fall. Since currency represents the aggregate value of the economy that supports the currency, an issue of new currency does not create new value, simply a greater number of dollars supported by the same economy. The net result is inflation in the domestic economy, and devaluation in the foreign exchange market.

There is a significant difference between domestic and foreign debt. Domestic debt is effective money that an economy owes itself. Government can fairly freely deficit finance domestic debt, because the value of economic growth generated through the deficit will be recovered through taxation on the economic activity that the debt repayment represents. It is when government finances its deficit from offshore that the structure becomes precarious, because of the outflow that it represents.

When looking at the aggregate national economy, there are a few macroeconomic indicators that are relevant, most particularly the current account balance. The US runs a current account deficit somewhat over 5% of GDP. So far, the effect of this has been mitigated by the increase in value of foreign assets held by americans as compared with the domestic assets held by foreigners. If this trend were to reverse, however, there would be a significant impact. If a national economy were to wind up in a situation in which the foreign assets held by it were less valuable than the domestic assets held by foreign hands; AND the domestic economy was unable to generate sufficient income to meet obligations on foreign held debt, then the national economy would be well and truly bankrupt. The usual national response is to suspend payments before that situation arises.

So does a gold standard mitigate any of this? Not one jot. When a currency is fixed to a commodity value (and in this day and age, it would be far more likely to be light, sweet crude than gold!) it has two signficant problems:

1) Your economy can never grow larger than the the reserves that back your currency. Furthermore, the assets that back the currency are not available to the economy, thus distorting the price of the commodity.

2) As the commodity is freely traded in the marketplace, your currency, perforce, fluctuates in value according to the value of the commodity. If the price of gold surges, then a currency backed by gold also surges. That means that the country's exports are priced out of competition, leading to a deficit pressure on the current account. When the price plummets, the purchasing power of the currency is similarly dropped.

Don't for a moment suspect that the currency is not "backed" by anything. A freely floating currency is regulated by the marketplace. Currency speculators evaluate the economy that backs the currency, and make purchase and sale decisions, accordingly. Why is the CAD roughly at par with the USD, now? Because our economic indicators are significantly stronger than the USAs, unlike the situation 15 years ago when we faced significant downward pressure on commodities prices (and thus our economic capacity).

If everything can be produced by 10% of the population, it's not thieving. The reason this can happen is because of technology developed over the centuries. Why, who is to say that we aren't all thieving from the people who invented the wheel? Why aren't we paying their descendants eternal royalties? Why don't we make them absolute dictator with control over all to show our undying gratitude?

Then again, we are stealing from the dead instead so we should make sure the dead rules. Americans like to boast that they're ruled by the dead so perhaps they understand how we owe the dead everything.

Royalities and exclusive rights were and are intended for the inventors and creators who did the work, not for their descendant who did not do the work. Transferring patent rights to the descendants transforms then into rent collectors.

ruveyn

Royalties should be limited (as should all forms of "intellectual property"), offering protectionism on the happy birthday song for 100 years serves no purpose.

The patent system particularly is anti-competition and nothing to do with anything intellectual or ownership of ideas. If they really want it to be about that limit the idea leg up to five years tops, and ensure that if the inventor wants to change venture capitalist/investors, they keep it as their own. In other words it cannot be shared out between investors only inventors simply form a contractual basis in which to licence to partners/companies to use the technology, and this remains even if they go bankrupt. Patents that are licensing an application of an existing technology should be barred as should any of the other ridiculous patent that have nothing to do with innovation. Ever-greening should not be possible, nor should patent burying, or patenting of fictional/future technologies.

Also countries like China, India, Brazil should do well to ignore calls to enforce foreign patents.

All economies are contrived, however that is no excuse for such a lame system. The idea of total ownership of ideas is laughable anyway.