Are we just supposed to leave out that many empires simply collapsed, like the Roman Empire? So that it didn't go back to a gold standard because it no longer existed?

I mean, maybe you have a point. Few that become heavy meth users ever go back to being healthy.

"Since those dim beginnings in the forests of the Stone Age, governments have been perpetually rediscovering first the splendors and later the woes of inflation. Each new government discoverer of the splendors seems to believe that no one has ever beheld such splendors before. Each new discoverer of the woes professes not to understand any connection with the earlier splendors. In the thousands of years of inflation's history, there has been nothing really new about inflation, and there still is not." -- Jens O. Parson

https://recision.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/jens-parsson-dy...