Bah. The dollar is backed by the full faith and credit of the US government, with its ability to extract reveneues from a population of 300 million

Unfortunately the tax base of the US, and most other jurisdictions, is founded upon the taxation of earned income, which is disappearing fast down the toilet as the productive sector shrinks. The Left swallow this idiocy because they know (having read their Marx) that all value comes from Labour. It suits the Right, on the other hand, to go along with this bollocks because it is entirely consistent with taxation of earned income - rather than the unearned income derived from the privileged property rights of those who own the US.

If a large part of taxation were in fact derived from the use value of land/location - as it is in (say) Hong kong and Denmark, where up to 30% of taxation comes from this use value - then the US dollar could indeed be correctly thought of as land-backed.

"Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky