Ah, I get it now. I was getting confused over people demanding more purchasing power vs. the actual purchasing power of money. Maybe it’s useful to talk about “relative purchasing power” (i.e. one’s ability to engage in exchanges) vs. “absolute purchasing power” (i.e. how many goods a given quantity of money can be exchanged for). It also seems to me that the latter is equivalent to the notion of “price level” in other schools of economic thought.