Comment by mindslight

Because whenever economic progress (eg offshoring, efficiency improvements, better competition) happens and gets expressed to the market (ie lower prices), the explicit government policy is to consider this as some kind of failure and create enough new money that not only do prices stay the same, but rather actually go up.

This might even be workable if there were a corresponding government policy to gradually redefine full time employment as an ever lower number of hours. But instead we've been steeped in fallacious "free market" ideology that would paint any such thing as government meddling, even as it hypocritically gives a pass to the inflation treadmill itself.