That’s right, and an external standard like the gold standard helps mitigate political meddling.
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It helps, but the crooks can usually find a way around it.
We were on the Bretton Woods system for a while which backed the dollar with gold but only in the foreign exchange system. When France demanded gold for their dollars, Nixon had to put an end to the system, and the inflation problem we had in the 1970’s was the result. It wasn’t Nixon’s fault, but the fault of all the spending the crooks did and were able to get away with because the dollar had a propped up artificial value. (The conversion rate was manipulated by the crooks in DC.)
I think it can make sense to back a currency temporarily in order to restore confidence in a currency, but other than that it gives a false sense of security in the long term and adds costs to the monetary system.
All a standard like the gold standard does is give a relatively fixed value to the dollar. It’s like your scales at home that are set at sixteen ounces to the pound. If you changed your scale to seventeen ounces to the pound, you wouldn’t weigh any less, it would just appear that way. Same with a fixed external standard like the gold standard to the dollar. Keeping a relatively fixed standard allows a much higher degree of confidence in prices between buyers and sellers.