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The 'trick' is not saying the second half of the sentence, which is 'and consumers can better afford those increased prices because of their increased wages.'
If wages go up 15% and prices go up 5%, consumers are better off. The trick is pretending that consumers and workers are different people, and only looking at how something affects one of them, instead of looking at both sides of the equation and asking whether it's a net gain or a net loss.
Unionization only eliminates market forces if everyone in the country is in the same union, which would indeed be weird. The point is to have enough unions that a boss firing everyone in one union to switch to another is as costly and disruptive for them as losing a job and trying to find a new one would be to an employee.
Rounding everything that advocates for any change at all to the current economic regime off to 'communism' is a thought-terminating cliche in discussions like this.
That’s sounds like make believe. It’s not a “trick”. It’s just let’s assume prices and wages go up different amounts.
The magic of markets is the price system and firms competing in prices forced them to become more efficient.
At best this sounds like pre-Reagan/Thatcher where growth was slower and people were poorer. You would need to invalidate the productivity gains from that era.
With history as a guide the more likely scenerio would be prices go up 30% and wages go up 15%.
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