> If we're speaking historically, under inflation the prices of consumer goods have tended to rise faster than wages.
Inflation is defined in terms of the price of consumer goods, and in the US, wages have kept pace with inflation.
> Of course lately we have massive improvements in technology to thank for boosting productivity in almost every field, which somewhat masks the negative effects of the inflation. If it weren't for that there probably wouldn't be much of an economy left by this point.
That's a non sequitur, as inflation is actively managed with a goal target rate. Had it started to drift, the rates that govern inflation would have been adjusted.
> Of course artificial deflation is no better; the ideal is not forced deflation but rather a currency whose supply is not subject to manipulation.
This does not follow either as the currency supply needs to be able to respond to external factors, such as increases or decreases in population. In an increasing population, a currency with no new coins is deflationary. In a decreasing population, it is inflationary.
Money supply needs to be able to respond to externalities.
> Inflation is defined in terms of the price of consumer goods …
There is more than one definition of inflation. Price inflation, the definition you cite, is defined in terms of the prices of consumer goods. This conflates a number of different factors, for example money supply, demand for various kinds of consumer goods, improvements in production efficiency, and direct demand for currency, and for that reason is basically useless for economic analysis, especially if the supply is not held constant. Supply inflation considers only changes in the money supply. You can safely assume that anywhere I use the term "inflation" I am not referring to the useless measure of price inflation but rather to supply inflation.
> … as inflation is actively managed with a goal target rate …
Irrelevant, as the goal is set in terms of consumer prices (see above) and it is the changes in the money supply, not consumer prices, that cause the problems. They're controlling the wrong metric. Consumer prices should have been allowed to fall in response to efficiency improvements. That would have benefited everyone. Wages would fall too, but slower than prices, so purchasing power would increase. Instead they pushed prices to increase to meet their price inflation target, leaving wages to trail behind.
> … the currency supply needs to be able to respond to external factors, such as increases or decreases in population …
It does not. Only the value of the currency needs to adjust to accommodate external factors, and it does so automatically without any change in the supply. Adjustments might be required if the value changes so much as to make the currency awkward to deal with—for example, if price deflation led to typical USD prices being only a few cents we would need new coins with finer resolution—but that is not a major issue for any fiat currency or cryptocurrency where the divisions into units are basically arbitrary. The same applies for price inflation, of course, as we can observe with various countries phasing out smaller coins and bills. It can be an issue for commodity currencies where e.g. the amount of gold needed to buy a meal is simply too small an amount to reasonably store or exchange in the form of a solid coin. (A 1/10 ounce gold coin the size of a dime is worth over $100.)
Inflation is defined in terms of the price of consumer goods, and in the US, wages have kept pace with inflation.
> Of course lately we have massive improvements in technology to thank for boosting productivity in almost every field, which somewhat masks the negative effects of the inflation. If it weren't for that there probably wouldn't be much of an economy left by this point.
That's a non sequitur, as inflation is actively managed with a goal target rate. Had it started to drift, the rates that govern inflation would have been adjusted.
> Of course artificial deflation is no better; the ideal is not forced deflation but rather a currency whose supply is not subject to manipulation.
This does not follow either as the currency supply needs to be able to respond to external factors, such as increases or decreases in population. In an increasing population, a currency with no new coins is deflationary. In a decreasing population, it is inflationary.
Money supply needs to be able to respond to externalities.