people hoard good food in their vaults while giving other people their bad food as quickly as they can, because the government has decreed that bad food is equivalent to good food?

that's total nonsense. gresham's law doesn't apply to food

It's also the simple fact that the average blue collar worker hasn't seen rising wages since the 80s. All the money accrued to the top, and the workers were left trying to make the same value of take home pay stretch farther and farther.

The reason most people think inflation sucks is because modern society would rather collapse than pay workers in line with historical norms.

>It's also the simple fact that the average blue collar worker hasn't seen rising wages since the 80s.

You probably need to define what you mean by average blue collar worker as there are many ways of looking at this data (and it is often difficult to even find the estimated levels of transfer payments being given). For example, this Fed chart shows CPI adjusted median household income rising from around 57 thousand to around 75 thousand today: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

Every real wage chart I see looks like workers have made slight but reasonably steady improvements since 2000 and are 10-15% ahead of the 1980s.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

I’ve always assumed the problem is that price increases don’t count as inflation if they come with a “quality” increase, but that doesn’t help someone who now needs to spend more to survive.

So it can both be true that inflation-adjusted wages are rising and it is becoming harder to make ends meet.

A wage that supported a cowboy with two sets of clothes, a house that wouldn’t pass any building codes, a horse instead of a car, and no phone is not going to support a modern worker even if “adjusted” for inflation.

Your comment makes me wonder what the relative total cost of a horse vs a car is.

historical norms were that workers were slaves with no civil rights that nobles or citizens could kill or rape with impunity

so fuck historical norms actually