What good are increasing wages if it is accompanied by inflation that negates those increases?
The truth is that the minimum wage worker today is able to purchase a LOT more than they could in the past.
The only two costs that have gone up disproportionately are housing and healthcare. The former is due to bad government policy that encourages homeownership as an investment. The latter is due to cost disease.
To get an FHA loan, all sorts of stuff has to be present and in good condition. Zoning requirements, building codes, and the ADA have all jacked up prices. You can't just build yourself a shack anymore.
Example location: Sommerville Massachusetts, where you can't legally build the city today. Nearly everything is in violation. The same applies in Manhattan.
Example feature: We now have to have arc fault interrupters and wired-together fire alarms, even if you can't stand them. For decades we got by with low-cost circuit breakers and battery-powered fire alarms.
People who are living well start to see expensive things as being important, and so they feel that the features should be mandated, and it seems like only a trivial cost... but just like software bloat, it adds up over time. Sellers of the features push for it too. We end up pricing less-well-off people out of the market.
I am simply prohibited from building a house that would have been good-quality construction in medieval times. I can't even build an ordinary house of the 1980s... and even last year's design is often illegal to build. There is a ratchet effect here. Requirements keep getting added, but none are ever removed.
Personally, I think free market belongs to a class of spherical cow models.
Nothing. But that’s not the situation we’re in. The implication that your “if” would come true is an argument against any increase in wages ever. but it assumes that we’re in some sort of equilibrium where everyone spends 100% of their money and spends it on the same things.
Except for energy, housing, health care, and education. But besides that sure, android phones are cheap!
It's not just electronics that are cheaper. Things we take for granted now - owning a refrigerator, a car, heck even things like electricity and plumbing - were out of reach for many people a matter of decades ago. Sure many of these things were made in good old 'Murica back then and created low-skilled jobs - but these products also cost a much larger percentage of the average household's available income.
You're also ignoring the immense benefit that free global markets provide for countries other those in the First World. China's shift to a free market economy singlehandedly halved global poverty. We tend to index heavily on the American that needs to change fields when his job is "shipped overseas". Rarely do litanies against free markets consider those overseas - almost always in a more precarious financial position than the country that is losing low skilled jobs - who get a chance to improve their lives due to free global markets.
I think it's important to view the trajectory of progress not in how is lines up with how reality lines up with our expectations (because any optimistic society will - and should - strive for better), but by seeing how our reality lines with with what used to be reality.
Yes we get it, it's great that we have antibiotics and electricity, but it's completely missing the point. Food, shelter, education, and health are not luxury goods, they are the foundation of a functioning civilization.