What about a mature company? What about to continue to keep their salary at what it was before, to combat inflation? What about if they honestly are doing well and deserve more money?
To expound upon the inflation bit. Whenever you do not give an employee a raise that matches inflation, you're decreasing his salary by decreasing its buying power.
My opinion is based on the notion that it is generally bad to cede control over your own interest. To wait for management to give you what you want rather than to simply ask for what you want is to cede responsibility for wage change to management, which will generally not be in the employee's best interest.
Another more practical problem with the OP's desire to abrogate responsibility for price-setting is that it is impossible to objectively gauge the value of an employee outside of the marketplace. That value is fundamentally determined by the marketplace, by who is willing to pay what for your efforts. As much as we'd like to, we cannot ignore the fact that price is determined by supply/demand even for our own work.
I believe that employees would be better served by accepting the reality of the basis of their wages rather than waiting for some sort of ill-defined "enlightened" management to give you "what you deserve".
As an employee, you want to take control over negotiating your own raises because that generally results in more money for you. In that sense, I agree with your posts.
As a manager, you want to move employees away from political behavior. Feelings of unfairness are a big demotivator, and if you wait for employees to ask for raises, then there will be very little correlation between competence and pay. Employees will find this out, and the result will be your employees focus on politics, feel like life is unfair, and in general will be less productive.
To expound upon the inflation bit. Whenever you do not give an employee a raise that matches inflation, you're decreasing his salary by decreasing its buying power.