When society operates under free market mechanics, prices don’t go up. As an example, look at the electricity prices up to 1970 or so:
The price in 1973 was still below the price of 1919, a full 54 years prior. If prices do not rise in 54 years, then you have evidence that you are operating under free market mechanics. With a caveat that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is not a perfect measure of price change, workers could afford a lot of electricity with their wages:
If the CPI was a perfect measure of price change, then workers in 1968 could afford to buy 8 times the electricity of workers back in 1934. Here is a longer time series showing how the affordability of electricity stopped rising for blue collar workers:
[Q1 of 1942 ~ 1.00; with 4 times the purchasing power by 1969]
But as this last graph shows, elites are successfully making electricity cost more — due to the fact that not enough people have demanded a return to free markets. By allowing government to make more rules and spend more money, we condemn ourselves to lower living standards: the price of bare necessities rise.
Reference
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: Electricity in U.S. City Average [CUUR0000SEHF01], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SEHF01
National Bureau of Economic Research, Average Weekly Earnings, Manufacturing, Total for United States [M08261USM052NNBR], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M08261USM052NNBR
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Average Weekly Earnings of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees, Manufacturing [CES3000000030], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES3000000030
Please place it in the context of server farms, bitcoin mining and deregulation that also cut the cord of vertical integration.
Yes, we have far too much market distortion and I agree that it's a key to understanding. That said, carefully-regulated monopolies also froze out the reselling parasites.