It was perplexing to me that the answer to such a simple question could be so simple, yet so complex—and, moreover, absurd.

So? Where does money come from?

I found that the short answer is that new money is created by either 1) artificial bank credit expansion through the fractional-reserve lending process; or 2) the Central Bank prints it (It then uses the newly printed money to buy assets from private banks and adds said assets to its balance sheet). In both instances, new money is conjured, being created out of thin air, and injected into the economy through various means, thus eroding the purchasing power of those not privileged enough the enjoy the new money.

In other words, a state-enabled cartel of banks counterfeits it.

As Murray Rothbard explained in The Case Against the Fed, the counterfeiting process is enabled through the institution of Central Banking:

The Central Bank has always had two major roles: (1) to help finance the government's deficit; and (2) to cartelize the private commercial banks in the country, so as to help remove the two great market limits on their expansion of credit, on their propensity to counterfeit: a possible loss of confidence leading to bank runs; and the loss of reserves should any one bank expand its own credit. For cartels on the market, even if they are to each firm's advantage, are very difficult to sustain unless government enforces the cartel. In the area of fractional-reserve banking, the Central Bank can assist cartelization by removing or alleviating these two basic free-market limits on banks' inflationary expansion credit.1
Central Banking is incredibly damaging to the economy.