I sometimes feel my entire life in advertising has been wasted, and not for the reason you may assume. No, my problem is that I am increasingly becoming a bit of a Georgist. It makes no sense to me that we are taxing people more for working than for living off rent or unearned capital gains. But, additionally, I increasingly wonder what the point is of making goods cheaper and better for consumers if any savings are mopped up by rises in property prices.

It’s rather like that half-joking observation that any economic gains in India will simply be spent on ever more expensive weddings. In Britain it’s worse. At least in India the guests get to enjoy a wedding. In Britain, expenditure on property is entirely rivalrous – a negative-sum game.

Over the 34 years of my working life, I have seen human ingenuity, technology and globalisation combine to develop products and services which offer much greater value for money. Televisions, cars, food, cafés, restaurants, clothing, air travel, telephony and domestic appliances have all become better and more affordable. There are lots of good reasons why you may wish to go back in time, but shopping, like dentistry, isn’t one of them.

Many modern goods are also bizarrely egalitarian. Someone on well below medium income can own a phone which, only four years previously, was the best in the world. And it comes with a free camera which not long ago would have cost £1,000.

It occurs to me that my children are blind to these improvements, since they lack any longer-term comparisons. This helps explain why young people are considerably less enthusiastic about free-market capitalism than their elders – they haven’t been around long enough to see it work.

A few years ago I was on the tarmac at Sydney airport awaiting take-off and I briefly giggled. ‘For a minute back there I turned on our central heating at home.’ ‘Dad, you are such an idiot!’ I then realised my children had never experienced a world where controlling your boiler from the other side of the planet was remotely novel. They hadn’t sat through endless episodes of Tomorrow’s World explaining that – maybe – in 20 years’ time, you could buy a bus ticket through your 22-inch television.

If you wanted to run a campaign promoting consumer capitalism, it would be easy. Just as in a sale, when price tags carry a ‘Was’ and ‘Now’ price, you would simply mandate that every product bear the current price and the price in real terms in 1980. Kitting out your child for school? ‘Was £700’ – ‘Now £200!’

So why don’t we feel better off?

And here’s where I explain my Georgism. We don’t feel richer because the rising cost of property has absorbed most of the gains created elsewhere, shifting productive spending away from goods and services towards rentier capitalism. Imagine if all goods carried a label stating what they would have cost if the price had increased in line with property prices since 1980. Ideal Home recently performed this calculation, and found that a double duvet would be £1,500.

It is long-term property prices, not a temporary spike in the cost of food or energy, that represent the real cost- of-living crisis. Until we do something to curb this, working consumers will not benefit from lower prices – they will merely fuel the property Ponzi scheme: ‘Dear consumer capitalism, thank you for all your work promoting ever better, cheaper goods and services. We couldn’t have done it without you. (Signed) Britain’s banks and buy-to-let landlords.’

And for people who have made an untaxed £300,000 gain on their house, but are now complaining that vine tomatoes are a bit expensive, I have two words of advice. The second one is ‘off’.