>Keeping it from going up and giving disproportionate gains to money holders past is part of the job. There's nothing ironic about it, this is the job of central banks, and there's nothing shady about it.

There is something incredibly shady about it, because inflationary monetary policy is inherently a regressionary redistribution of purchasing power and wealth due to Cantillon effects whereby those relatively closer to the printing press (governments, banks, and asset holders in roughly that order) gain a higher purchasing power than those at the very end of the chain which has traditionally been wage-earners and average workers.

There is no need to print money in a growing economy, it's purely ideology from the Keynesian economic establishment where they've somehow convinced the general public that it is crucial to have a steady inflation in an economy because otherwise people won't spend money or invest (which is a priori false, as time preference is a thing in both humans and firms). For thousands of years gold has been used as a monetary backing (which is deflationary by definition), and some of the highest recorded levels of economic growth in history has generally been slightly deflationary (the United States during the 1800s is a prime example).