less than 1% of the population make minimum wage. Most companies, even the big ones you hate, pay well above minimum wage. For instance, All of the fast food places in my area pay $10.15/hour starting. The minimum wage is a few dollars less than this. The free market has pushed the wages higher, because nobody will work for less than this.
"I dream of a world in which the typical worker's wages hadn't been suppressed and decoupled from productivity for the last four decades"
It hasn't been suppressed or decoupled. If you have essentially have the skills that a high school student can perform at 30 years old, you aren't going to get paid enough to have a house, 2 kids, and a car. I see nothing wrong with this. If anything, the wages in the past were artificially inflated. Especially when you factor in unions.
We also are now competing globally. The beloved Internet has also created an environment where we need to compete with someone overseas making much less.
It has many parallels to file sharing over the last decade: musicians and artists now have to compete with the filing sharing sites because of the Internet and this same paradigm shift has now moved to other industries and jobs. The only difference is that I don't see people here on HN crying out to give the artists money through government intervention. Quite the contrary.
"and give it away instead of tryin' to get us all to punch the monkey and win"
I don't really see a problem with so many people trying to make money online. Money has fueled pretty much every technology breakthrough in the last 50 years.
Money also gives you power..over your own life and your own decisions. I started my own business online 5 years ago. I can schedule my own vacations and I don't need to answer to a boss. This is true freedom. I also contribute to many open source projects. When I was working for a living, I contributed nothing.
Your 'dream' would mean that most things online were free, ruining the ability for the independent artist to actually make a living with what they love. The end result would actually mean less freedom because our only choices would be working for the government or a large corporation.
The need for money will not go away any time soon and the person with the money makes the rules.
What we need is more educated people (so they don't have to work terrible jobs for little pay) and more people starting businesses and making money doing what they truly love (creating a more independent society).