I don't get your point at all. Printing money is destructive and Bitcoins don't have any value in and of itself. So what's the difference?
>while providing no beneficial goods or services
You DO provide a service, you validate transactions and expand the block chain. This service is very important, if nobody did it, Bitcoin transactions wouldn't go through.
See, it works like this: In order for Bitcoin to function transactions have to be validated. The amount of work is proportional to the amount of transactions that happened since the last validation block. Since no one would validate other people's transactions for free, people who put in the work to validate get 50 Bitcoins as payments. If validating was easy, everyone would do it and everyone would get a lot of Bitcoins. To prevent that, you have to add this "destructive" element of artificially making validating harder. Only by adjusting how much GPU cycles need to be wasted on average before you create a valid validation block can we make sure, that we only get one new validation block and 50 new Bitcoins every 10 minutes (on average).
Granted, printing Bitcoins might be MORE destructive than printing money and it would be nice if no calculations were "wasted", but since no one has found a better way to create a decentralized digital currency we have go with Bitcoins for now.