You can learn from a historical lesson. Do you know why medical insurance so inherently linked to the employment in the US? Because at the time of WWII, wages were fixed in a lot of places (they could pull it off since a lot of freedom suppression can pass in wartime) but employers still wanted to attract more and better workers. Thus, side benefits like employer paying medical insurance proliferated. If that were banned, there would be some other kind of compensation. Only by centrally regulating absolutely every aspect of life you could ensure this is not happening. But why would you want to live in such society? I lived in one, and it's not much fun.
There’s a reason this strategy was coupled with central-planning assignment of graduates to jobs.
Salaries already price in the “interestingness” of jobs.
Well, I wouldn't. Dealing with the general public would drain way more of my mental energy than programming. Which leaves us with two anecdotes.
My idea of the perfect worker co-op is where cashiers/programmers earn the same but that 'same' is above market value for the top level employee... so say devs go for 100k, cashiers also get 100k. Since there's no CEO/board/etc demanding 10 million/yr+ each then there's plenty to split.
Not really; the thing with the rich is that there aren't that many of them. Take the top 1% - their average income (including the people making billions) is $1.15M. Let's redistribute $1.1M of those. ($1.1M * (1% of population)) / population = 1% of $1.1M = $11k. So each person only gets $11k extra.
No, that's clearly wrong. If the top 1% get 20% of the income, redistributing their income to everyone else would give everyone else a 25% raise.
20% of 100 is 25% of 80.
So even the people in the 90th- to 99th percentiles would get a 20% raise?
But these are positive-negatives, i.e. the harm is done by being successful. When the company starts to fail, what then? What happens when a company needs to downsize? Which of the worker-owners will survive, and under what conditions? Will it be political, e.g. we all vote, so the 7 PAs who everyone loves get to stay, but the entire sales department gets voted out? What about if departments vote together? Seems very sketchy.
Ironically, the ability to survive failure is why our system perpetuates. In the hard times, hard choices can be made that are individually distasteful, but required. Evolution is driven by the non-dying breeding, and corporate evolution is similar, with company structures that can navigate the bad times - much more than maximise the good times - the ones most likely to be replicated.