I think most people have a very confused understanding of money(currency) and value. Workers produce value, not money. Workers get a cut of that value, which is converted to money. To get by comfortably in the US, a first world developed economy, you need to be producing a lot of value. Everything is made to accommodate high value workers.
Producing t-shirts, window fans, or toilet brushes is not high value work. The slice of value available to convert to currency for the worker is very tiny. So you end up having to play games with the economy which inevitably will blow up in someone's face. $60 t-shirts so we can pretend that the value in a t-shirt is much more than it is, so we artificially make t-shirt manufacturing competitive with, say, automobile manufacturing.
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