How do you figure we're not seeing them where they were 12 billion years ago? What you're saying sounds like post hoc rationalisation to me - more like theology than science. You're doing exactly what "pseudoscientists" are often accused of doing - beginning with the conclusion ("The Big Bang happened") and then cherrypicking the "evidence" to suit.
TFS,
Your arguing about the expansion of the universe, the big bang and inflation is a bit too simple. I cannot say that I could give a proper account of it, but at least I know what the cosmologists say about your questions.
The universe is not expanding in some empty space, it is space that is expanding itself. The velocity of light however is about its movement
in space. There is a lot of evidence that the big bang happened, but there are problems left, the uniformity of space being one of them. Inflation is an ad hoc hypothesis to explain this uniformity (e.g. the existence of an inflationary field had to be postulated) but it would nicely explain a few features of our universe. Now, one of the predictions of inflation, about the polarisation of the cosmic background radiation, has been confirmed, so it made the theory of cosmic inflation stronger. The search for verification (or falsification) of the theory separates it definitely from pseudo science.
Just have a glance at the Wikipedia articles about the big bang and about cosmic inflation: there the empirical evidence is nicely summed up.