There is no comparison between renting and owning. They are entirely different ways of life.

What I'm pointing out in the OP is, just because the price is going up doesent mean the value or underlying cost is going up. What is going up is the cost of living, and inflation is driving the value of your wages down, and this is why you can't afford a house. Its not because the cost of housing is going up.

It is safe to say productivity in the US has been largely flat since 2008, this means the value of the "best" companies in the US has also been flat. If you measure the world in terms of S&P500, this breaks the illusion of prices going up, and the reality of our earning power plummeting over the past 20 years.

To measure everything in bitcoin isn't quite fair given its obvious rising value. Bitcoin's value has risen faster than everything else, therefore its an equally, but oppositely, bad measuring stick to diagnose the problem. Oil and energy obviously is a manipulated market, the "value" has continued to decline in order to maintain political control. They are able to do this because the cost of production is marginal compared to value. In other words, the price to the US is mostly arbitrary. This is why the dollar price has been mostly stable.

Food, on the other hand, has gone down in value, while rising in terms of dollars, because we have opened up sourcing food from the globe. Historically that has been impractical due to a lack of preservation technology and a higher cost of transportation both of which are downstream of the cost of energy, this alongside infinite trade deficits and the dollar milkshake effect. All combined competition, it's amazing any food at all can be produced within our borders. This is a testimony to the power of American resilience. But nothing in this world is infinite, other than stupidity the potential for evil.

The bottom line is, financialization of securities and housing, uncontrolled immigration and cloaked corruption of work and education visas has gutted our employment market and driven down wages to the benefit of this same S&P500 group of companies. Therefore, instead of being able to land an entry-level job as an engineer or manager in a large company, we are left to reorganize shelves at the supermarket or carry boxes for UPS if we are lucky enough to find a job at all.