When people don't have expendable income they can't send the economic signals necessary to inform producers.  I don't know if there is an economic stable state where everyone has a living wage but we need to look hard for one.  We might need to adjust tax laws to make it happen.  Some care about what is fair and just.  I care about outcome.  We can deal with fairness later.

Most of us earn our living through our labor.  We don't have the savings to survive very long without a paycheck.  This puts a downward pressure on the labor market since we have to settle so we can survive. 

Retirees have been moved from defined benefit plans to defined contribution plans.  Retirees have to schedule dividends and interest sufficiently to provide living income or they have to sell some of their capital.  If they have to sell capital they have to settle on the price when they need to make the sale and this puts a downward pressure on capital assets

Only those who don't need to make a trade can wait for the markets to come to them.  They don't need to settle or either a buy or a sell so they can use a strategy to their advantage.  They can even play games with the market to their advantage.

What we are seeing in the US is the end game of unequal power.  Our economy is grinding to a halt as a smaller and smaller portion of the population has an ever increasing percentage of the nation's wealth.  We have to change the dynamics so these people have to make trades at least as urgently as those beneath them.  We don't need to be confiscatory and shouldn't want to be.  We merely need to adjust the conditions of the trade where the very wealthy isn't getting as great of growth as the economy.  The excess growth should be distributed most heavily to the poor then trailing off up the wealth scale.  The rate of growth should help inform us.