To the extent that debt resembles counterfeiting, it is evil. Here's an example: suppose you want to buy a prime waterfront property which is offered for auction. You've worked hard, saved your money in the bank, and you finally have enough deposited to make a substantial offer. At the auction, you meet Joe. Joe also wants the property. Joe hasn't saved as much money as you have, but he has a line of credit from the bank, a line of credit made possible because the bank is using your on-deposit money as a reserve against which it can loan out new money. Whether or not you win the auction, the price of the real estate is higher than it would otherwise be because of Joe's ability to bid against you. This seems wrong. Why should the fact that you saved money enable a non-saver to drive up your prices?
Note that without fractional reserve banking, Joe's line of credit would be backed by money deposited for a term. So the saver's prices should not be affected by the borrower, because the while the borrower is using the money, the saver has agreed not to use it. Under 100% reserve banking, a depositor never has to bid against his own deposits.
With that out of the way, counterfeiting does not necessarily take wealth away from anybody. In a depressed economy, it could just activate unused resources and stimulate production so that the overall amount of wealth increases by at least the amount represented by the counterfeit money.
That said, counterfeiting is still wrong for the same reason it is wrong for you to hack into your bank's computer systems to increase the amount of money in your account: Society has agreed upon a set of rules that underlie the distribution system of our economy, and both the hacking and the counterfeiting go against these rules.
Addendum: In a way, forbidding counterfeiting is a slippery-slope situation. A single act of counterfeiting does not necessarily take wealth away from anybody. But if counterfeiting were allowed, the whole system could not possibly work.
Now imagine your scenario where you go with your saved money looking for borrowers (people willing to write you that promissory note). But no one is willing to write you that promissory note, because the banking system is willing to lend to them whatever they want with a value of X so low that you find it not worth the risk. In fact the value of X is presently less that the pace of inflation (negative real interest rates).
So now all the baby-boomers with their life savings can't earn a penny on it while bankers with printed fiat front run them in the money market.
Inflation may be good for those excessively leveraged in debt, but it is equally bad for all those who have saved and are investing their earnings. It perversely rewards the over indebted and punishes the prudent saver.
Interest rates ideally should be set by the market. In times of excess capital to invest, rates would be low. In times of capital tightness, rates would rise. In this way rates are a measure of the health and state of the capital and investment markets. Interest rate mechanisms are now so completely corrupted that there is not market mechanism left. Rates are not a measure of the economy any more, they are miss-set centrally and then the entire market distorts around them.