The price of precious metals is actually being artificially suppressed. Their price acts as a gauge of the effectiveness of our current fiat money; if the price of gold kept rising against the $USD, people would lose faith in the purchasing power the $USD carries since it's very evident it's losing value vis a vis the price of gold. So central banks and other fiat-money cartels collude to sell mass amounts of 'paper gold', which are claims on physical gold stored in some vaults somewhere, except at this point is to be understood that most the gold in existence has multiple claims drawn on it, so if people ever went to redeem these claims en masse the institutions selling them would collapse.
Our society is literally run by the forces that print our money. They will do anything to keep this power. Military occupation of oil fields, bullying smaller countries to go in debt to them, asset price manipulation. If you could print money at will and have people accept that shit? Hell yeah you wouldn't want to give it up. You're essentially as rich as you want to say you are, so long as people accept it, even if you have to fund the military to invade and subjugate their country. Once you wrap a society up into using your debt-based money they're stuck using it, because if they choose to ditch the currency they're effectively defaulting on that debt (even if the money they borrowed was created from thin air) and you have the legal authority to demand reprimands of natural resources or political submission or invade their country or whatever you want. The people behind the Federal Reserve are madmen trying to build their own personal empire off the work of taxpayers.
But really that's how the world's been run for the past several centuries, central banking has been a thing for a long time.
If some collapse hits us and the price of gold skyrockets, you won't be able to redeem your paper gold for real, physical gold. You just won't.