The short term benefits and ramp up time for production for an industrialized nation are quite substantial given an external threat and limited time. It also removes the funding concerns that would normally inhibit perpetual war, and its well known that those who attach closest to the origin of the flow of money get the most purchasing power before everyone else allowing them to enrich themselves.

The world on the gold standard didn't have one country almost bring down every industrialized economy on the planet (and fiat still might do that). Brittle structures break under load.

> Conservatively managed fiat currency seems to work basically fine. The trouble is when the system is corrupted.

Yes, but this perspective "is" the problem. It is taking parts of the cycle in isolation and extrapolating from those parts while ignoring/dismissing the other parts. This is fallacy called cherry-picking, its a natural bias we have if we don't take pains to avoid it.

To be accurate and objective you have to look at the entire lifecycle as a whole.

When you print money you have a boom bust cycle, eventually that turns into a boom bust bailout cycles in fiat through non-reserve money-printing. The boom can't be sustained which causes a bust cycle, each time this happens there is an exponential need for liquidity that must be pumped in through debasement to get back to normal, and it doesn't stop at normal but creates the next boom cycle because its based on lagging indicators. This then goes to the next bust cycle, to bailout again, to boom etc. Chaotic whipsaws that cannot be predicted in specificity but can be predicted as recurring patterns (like dam collapses/avalanches).

The bust cycle in crisis without money printing leads potentially to deflationary collapse, so they always print more. Eventually though you cannot print more. The monetary property of a stable store of value is lost first, then people stop transacting losing the second property which is a medium of exchange. The resources aren't available to raise children leading to a birth rate crisis which further worsens as "dead men ruling" continue the cycle neglecting the generational contract, and the unrepresented generation ends up just letting it rot and not contributing or being unable to contribute in any meaningful way. Opportunity costs of things becomes so distorted that there is no opportunity aside from businesses directly tied to money printing, and business outside the system (crime).

As a whole, it is a hyperbolic system requiring an external and exponentially increasing impulse to keep going each time and this is paid with IOUs. When you don't have those dynamics, you don't have the resulting outcomes that cause potential societal collapse events of that magnitude happen.

Eventually independent production ceases because there is no profit to be made. From that point you get creeping ruin, everything falling apart, corruption causing shortage that sustains, then famine and death. Socio-economic collapse beyond the limits to growth which is just business as usual.

In the lifetime of the entire cycle, given it happening at least several times in history, you have to assume the flaw is one of structure, the system will always be corrupted, because the incentives make it so without any counteraction possible.