Yes, we all know that there are hedging strategies against this. But hedging strategies cannot work on average. So the folks who spend their time worrying about the best heding strategies like inflation because they benefit at the expense of others.
BTW inflation is personally very good for me because the value of my house has skyrocketed literally. But that doesn't mean I think that I came by the gain in a morally sound fashion. I came by it through hard work sitting on my floor drinking beer making sure no one came to cart it off.
Your position that inflation necessarily picks people's pockets is decidedly incoherent, after that, but I will take it at its most charitable.
The position of being short dollar debts while being long real assets like real estate is not exactly exceptional in the US. You are not the only one who has fully insulated themselves against the effects of inflation by such positioning.
In case you haven't notice, the entities taking the other side of that trade are precisely the banks you are pretending are picking everyone's pockets. They are long the dollar denominated mortgage debt that you are short. Moreover, they are still exposed to downswings in real estate prices, because of the implicit "put" involved in accepting the houses as collateral. More, they have also written "call" options on the long debt, effectively, because mortgage debtors are free to refinance when rates fall.
Some pickpockets. They've given you the sweetheart debt deal that has actually allowed you to avoid the effects of inflation. And now, precisely when some of those debts have gone sour, you turn around and pretend to denounce them for robbing *you*, when they are the ones who aren't being paid back by their contracting counterparties.
If you were deliberately playing a game of "heads I win, tails I welsh and denounce you to socialist goons", it wouldn't differ from your actual behavior in the matter in any essential.
Can hedging activities work on average? Of course they can. The overall effect of inflation can be determined pretty precisely. All the debt shorts are matched by someone else's longs, except for the position in the narrow money supply itself, defined as physical FRNs and non-interest bearing checking account deposits. All the other can simply earn interest as inflation changes. This is a total position of a couple trillion, and the total gain on it is two orders of magnitude less, or between $50 and 100 billion per year at typical recent rates.
This is literally a rounding error in GDP. More, it doesn't cover the running costs of the banking and payments system it supports. If it were all the banking system took in in revenue, that system couldn't afford to open all of the envelopes and process all the checks etc. Banks on the whole have actual expenses of about 40% of their gross revenue - the most efficient maybe 30-35% - and earn (net) around 1 to 1.25% on their total assets.
It is, moreover, a typical and voluntary seinorage, and the checkable deposits portion of it is voluntary - the sums involved could be moved to money markets or savings if those holding them wanted etc. Making the purely involuntary portion of inflation "losses" equal to the Fed's seinorage on physical FRNs. But then the Fed pays its net earnings from such things to the treasury every year, so it is six or one, half dozen of another, whether that is earned by FRN seinorage or collected in extra income taxes and the like.
The unavoidable costs of inflation are tiny, not worth worrying about. What actually happens is some position themselves better than others, and that can set up significant net transfers from benefitting groups to harmed ones - but those are results of their capital market trading with each other, same as there are winners and losers in the stock market, etc.