So here's a question that economists have never been able to give me a satisfactory answer to: if we didn't have money, and were hypothetically just exchanging goods and services for each other, would inflation be a good thing? And why does this answer suddenly change as soon as we have money as a proxy for trade?

Without fail, every economist (self-proclaimed or otherwise) that I've spoken to will launch off into a lengthy maze of abstract concepts and conceptual dependencies that are supposed to show how this makes sense, but crucially at no point in that chain of indirection is an actual answer presented, it just builds assumption on assumption and most of those assumptions are just capitalist ideology rather than anything that holds up to logical scrutiny, usually some unsupported notion of 'good for society'.

I highly recommend asking this question when someone claims to you that "inflation is good actually", and see what answer comes out, if any.