Published: Tuesday, 18 Jun 2013 | 2:56 PM ET
By: Alex Rosenberg | CNBC Producer
There are gold bears, gold bulls, and gold bugs. And then there's Ron Paul.
The former congressman and presidential candidate is known for favoring gold, and he still believes it will go higher. How much higher?
"Eventually, if we're not carefully, it will go to infinity, because the dollar will collapse totally," Paul said on CNBC.com's "Futures Now."
A gold price of "infinity" might be hard to conceptualize, but Paul's point is actually quite simple.
He believes that "as long as we have excessive spending, and excessive computerized money, we are going to see gold go up," because the value of the dollar will be driven down. As each dollar becomes less valuable, it takes more of them to purchase an ounce of gold, meaning that the gold price measured in dollars rises.
Paul then takes it one step further. If Washington spending and Federal Reserveeasing he refers to ends up toppling the U.S. economy and makes the dollar worthless, then no amount of dollars will allow an individual to purchase an ounce of gold. In that nightmare scenario, the price of gold (or anything else) in dollar terms is technically "infinity."
Because of these larger forces undergirding his gold thesis, the unkind short-term action in gold doesn't worry Paul.
"Markets do these types of things—they go up sharply, and sometimes they take a rest," Paul said. "I was never very good on short term, whether it's the stock market, or whatever. But if you look at the record of the value of the dollar since the Fed's been in existence, we have about a 2-cent dollar. And gold used to be $20 an ounce. So I'd say the record is rather clear on the side of commodity money."
"Six thousand years of history shows that gold always retains value," Paul added, "and paper always self-destructs."
If the U.S. dollar does indeed "self-destruct," then no one will be particularly happy. But as Paul points out, people who exchanged dollars for gold will certainly be glad they did so while they still could.
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