I disagree strongly. Management has better things to do than push unasked-for money on employees, especially in a young company. An employee who wants more money can and should ask for it.
Management might have better things to do, but if this creates an atmosphere where employees feel under-appreciated, they'll leave, and this churn can really hurt the company, which makes it a huge problem for management that could have been avoided by rewarding high performing employees earlier.
But still I bristle at tacit assumption behind the OP's point that both the amount and timing of my wage increases should rest in the hand of a manager. The OP is saying that managers should be enlightened about it, and I'm saying you can't trust management to be enlightened about it and should take charge of your own compensation.
To expound upon the inflation bit. Whenever you do not give an employee a raise that matches inflation, you're decreasing his salary by decreasing its buying power.
Another more practical problem with the OP's desire to abrogate responsibility for price-setting is that it is impossible to objectively gauge the value of an employee outside of the marketplace. That value is fundamentally determined by the marketplace, by who is willing to pay what for your efforts. As much as we'd like to, we cannot ignore the fact that price is determined by supply/demand even for our own work.
I believe that employees would be better served by accepting the reality of the basis of their wages rather than waiting for some sort of ill-defined "enlightened" management to give you "what you deserve".
1. How managers should behave regarding raises
2. How employees should behave regarding raises
As an employee, you want to take control over negotiating your own raises because that generally results in more money for you. In that sense, I agree with your posts.
As a manager, you want to move employees away from political behavior. Feelings of unfairness are a big demotivator, and if you wait for employees to ask for raises, then there will be very little correlation between competence and pay. Employees will find this out, and the result will be your employees focus on politics, feel like life is unfair, and in general will be less productive.