I can't think of any serious leftist who would advocate for high costs, unless there was some fundamental resource constraint like with fossil fuels.

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PaulHoule 40 minutes ago | parent [-]

Well high wage implies a cost that has to be pushed on somewhere. It's not crazy to fear that raising wages, sometimes, can cause costs to go up, which can lead to more demand for higher wages. It may really depend on how much slack there is in the system.

What does improve material standard of living is increases in productivity, but the scope for those is limited, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

Like the basic story of the past 150 or so years is that agriculture has gotten dramatically more productive so people can do other things and move into cities with all sorts of implications.

	▲	inigyou 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		High wages raise purchasing power as much as they raise costs, so aren't exactly raising costs overall. In fact prices should be measured relative to wages. Non-wage costs (i.e. profit and rent) seem to be the killer. Note that Adam Smith hated rent.