The production of bitcoins is an integral part of the protocol, miners produce them as a part of the consensus-building mechanism, and anyone with a CPU can be a miner.
Bitcoin was specifically designed to have a transparent, fixed supply schedule and let demand set the price of the tokens. As a part of bitcoin's protocol, there will never be more than 21 million bitcoins.
Satoshi Nakamoto, who created bitcoin, thought a lot and explicitly about money and its roles -- unit of account, medium of exchange, store of value, etc. So it figures quite a lot in his papers, which you can read if you are interested.