Aren’t those who are pushing people to own gold really only trying to drive up the price of their own gold?
That is highly likely. The price of a good depends only on how much the buyer is willing to pay. It has little in common with the amount of labor that is needed to produce the good. These numbers get close to each other only when the product is a commodity, available from many different vendors who all try to offer a good price, or else they can't sell. A market of Chinese TV sets is one such example. A market of diamonds, on the other hand, is under control by one company. The rule of thumb is simple: if there are only few sellers they can dictate the price.
Let's see how many gallons of gas one ounce of gold buys you in the year 2000 and today.
Year 2000: gas=$1.30/gal, gold=$300/oz. One ounce of gold buys you 300/1.30 = 231 gallon. Great.
Year 2010: gas=$3.50/gal, gold=$1380/oz. One ounce of gold buys you 1380/3.50 = 394 gallons.
What do we see here? We see that oil increases in price faster than the gasoline. And gasoline is a finite natural product, in high demand, and with the world production going down.
There goes the argument of gold bugs that an ounce of gold could buy you a suit 100 years ago and today. This is not true. A fair price of gold (assuming year 2000 as a reference) would be $3.50/gal * 231 gal/oz = $800/oz. This is because the gasoline price increased by 269%, so the gold price should also increase the same - from $300 to $807. But in reality gold increased 170% on top of that - nearly twice as much! Either the world is awash in free, unwanted oil, with poor Arabs selling it for a song, or something fishy is happening in bullion markets.
The relative stability of ancient, precious metals based monetary system largely depended on the fact that all those metals were hard to obtain (really impossible for a peasant; mines were owned by aristocracy.) Even a King [of France] couldn't make money out of thin air if his gold supplies are gone.
If the disaster strikes tomorrow we cannot anymore depend on coins that are hard to manufacture - modern technology can easily do that, and counterfeiting factories may be the only ones that can afford to run. It will take not more than a week to flood the market with counterfeit gold and silver bars and coins, not even mentioning copper or nickel - those can be made by anyone, anywhere, on a benchtop arbor press. And there is no King (or the government) to chop your head off if you get caught; if you know "the right people" then you are safe.