Here's my walked to school in thigh deep snow, uphill both ways story:
I started as a police officer in Kansas for 3.87 (pretty sure) in 1976. Within a year I had bought a house for $20,000.00. A year later I had steel siding put on it for $3,200.00 IIRC, and the year after that we had the bathroom redone - adding a shower and pretty much tiling the whole thing, again IIRC, we paid $2,400.00 to the kid that did it - interesting back story, he was just out of high school, had worked fore his dad - the tile guy - until his dad had passed away, his mother was running the office and he was trying to keep the business viable, he did a great job on our bathroom.
In 1980 we sold that house for $34,000.00 and I took a job that paid me $15,000.00 a year. I remember the decision was easy - I had made a little over $9,000 the year before, which would have put my hourly wage at roughly $4.50 an hour - as a patrol sergeant on a small town police department.
Donuts were a nickel, candy bars and pop were a dime. Cable cost me a whooping $7.95 a month.
If you compare those costs to today you can see that prices for some goods have increased over 10 times during the ensuing years. Cost of goods is the same irrespective of the salary/wage you are making. Trust me on this, no one in Kansas is paying $38.70 an hour/$77,400.00 a year for entry level cops, which is ten times what I started at in 1976.
I think we need to keep in mind that even then, policing paid better than a lot of blue collar jobs.
But, heck, why did I waste my breath, everyone knows that wages for the middle and lower folks have been stagnant for the last 20+ years.
Here's the deal, a couple days ago someone posted a link to a book entitled: A Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the Lost Genius of American Prosperity
by Luigi Zingales. Using the metric that you can chart the intelligence of a person by how much their beliefs dovetail with yours, Luigi is a genius. He says what I believe much more succinctly than I could:
Here is the rub: 'Americans can not play the blame on one bad guy. Through our retirement funds and stock investments, WE are the owners of the very companies that lobby to grab our tax money and dominate our political life.'
That being said, I constantly need to remind myself that not everyone has the opportunity, and the drive, to put 1/2 of every raise they got into tax deferred SRA's for most of their career. In fact, I need to remind myself that most American's don't have retirement plans even close to what those of us who work(ed) for state, local and federal government agencies have the opportunity to benefit from.
During the decade that ended in 2012, the real income of the median American family dropped seven percent. (Zingales)
The median male in his twenties makes 19 percent less (in real terms) than his father made at the same age. (Zingales)
Not much has changed in that respect since 2012.
I don't know how we can have a free market system if we legislate morality. In my viewpoint we need to get back to the days when employees were looked upon as people, not resources, and the employer felt some responsibility for their well being. I'll be damned if I know how to accomplish that in today's world.