Do you and should you use the gold standard today?

No country in the world currently fixes its currency to gold. The last currency to be officially decoupled from gold was the Swiss Franc in 2000.

As to whether or not the gold standard should be employed today, one's worldview on government is usually the determining factor. If you believe that government has a responsibility to protect you from every possible harm, and provide cradle-to-grave security for everyone within its borders, than the gold standard is impossible. This is because government spending requires a Fiat (fake) currency so that the central bank can inflate the monetary base to allow more government spending. However, this debases the value of the currency, making your money buy less and less, which is an insidious and indirect form of taxation.

If, however, you take a limited government view, where the government is responsible only for enforcing contract law, protecting individuals from directly harming one another, and securing national borders, then the gold standard is the best recipe for limiting the size of government, since it cannot create gold out of thin air, and thus must be able to have on hand the gold reserves for all the money it prints. This ensures that your money is always worth the same amount of gold, which will actually result in deflation, making your money worth more and more all the time, meaning you can buy more with the money you have, as prices (and yes, wages) will fall over time. However, that directly rewards savings, meaning that your retirement fund or purchasing power will grow in value continually, since the same amount of money is constantly chasing more goods, driving down costs.

The answer for today is not necessarily a government-mandated gold standard, but instead competing currencies. If gold and silver were allowed, like the Constitution says, to be legal tender (i.e. the Federal Reserve Note system is 100% unconstitutional, and therefore illegal), then the worthless fiat dollar would have to compete with hard money like gold, silver, platinum, and whatever else was determined to hold market value as money. Of course, this would destroy the government's ability to inflate, since FRNs would eventually be ignored because of their plummeting value, forcing the government to actually cut spending.

So yes, we should have a hard money-backed financial system. Things get ridiculously out of hand when you have bailout-guaranteed, well-connected banks that create a derivatives market of ten times the national debt, and can lose billions and billions of dollars in mere seconds. Then, of course, these banks that made risky moves can then look to their pals in Congress to steal more funds from you, through direct taxation, postponed taxation (borrowing), or indirect taxation (inflation), to prop up their stupid financial decisions.