In fact, in some ways we did sixty years ago when a new car on average cost three month's gross wages. We gave it all up in exchange for "free trade," a bloated administrative state and mass immigration.
You are making the common mistake of assuming that the economic landscape sixty years ago was anything remotely resembling “normal.” In fact, it was the opposite. The post-WW2 period was a brief anomaly when the U.S. was the only major power to emerge from the war with its infrastructure and industrial capacity unscathed. Things began to unravel quickly in the 1960s when the rest of the world got back on its feet.