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?