Yeah, that's another good comparison.
The problem with these guys is that they have forceful personalities conductive to a cult-of-personality campaign and organization style. So they say a few things that make sense (in a "blind pig finds an acorn every once in a while" sense) and then certain people are willing to jump on board with everything else they say without considering what's being said because "this guy started out making sense."
Consider the guy above you: "Tell me, what has had value for thousands of years. I guess that preferring a metal that has had value for thousands of years and will have value as far as we can tell for thousands more, over a piece of paper that politicians can print pretty much at will, makes hima loon."
Actually, the problem with goldbuggery is that it cannot work in the modern economic system for two reasons:
#1 - Most of the gold in the world is being used for industrial applications.
#2 - Even absent #1, there is not remotely enough gold in the world for even one major nation to create a "backing" system to allow people to trade in their currency for raw gold.
Additionally, even if that did exist, gold puts immense downward pressures on currency and economics. So much so that even at the beginning of the US, we actually existed on a silver standard, and only created a silver-to-gold exchange ratio in 1792 due to a shortage of enough silver to back the currency. The 1792 expansion was - tadahh! - the government instantly creating money by adding another so-called precious metal to the currency base.
Historically, goldbuggery and silverbuggery were pretty much at odds, and there was constant changing and exchanging of the two metals with other countries that were engaging in the same foolishness and setting their own silver-to-gold exchange rates. The Independent Treasury Act of 1848 caused a lot of gold to migrate to the British due to a skewed exchange rate; this also caused the gold rush of 1849, because gold was so overvalued by law. Constant changes in the availability of one metal or the other - due to finding of new veins for mining - would cause devaluation or overvaluation in one locality or another.
In short: hitching your finances to goldbuggery and silverbuggery is insanity. And it seems the only people who can't figure that out (the "never learned history so they're doomed to repeat it" crowd) tend to be on the Ron Paul side of the political spectrum.