Even if you had that laudable motivation, I’d argue that if the going rate for drives a golf-cart security is $25K/yr, you do way more good to hire 3 of them at $66K/yr than 1 of them at $200K. Maybe to the point that hiring 1 @ $200K is arguably less ethical than hiring 3 @ $66K.
But were that funds limit a bit fuzzy, and we had the option to pay each of those 3-times-the-people at the $200K we decided was the amount to live comfortably in that place, that'd be another option.
(Not to sound all college-frosh socialist. I just suppose I shouldn't get too comfortable with societal compromises, since, if something doesn't bother me, I'm less likely to try to improve it. I also shouldn't congratulate myself on being bothered, and confuse any comfort from that with having actually made any effort on the problem.)
I haven't thought it through, but my initial gut feel is: possibly, if you did it from the start in an org.
My next question: if you're successful with creating that warm-fuzzy equitable utopia, but it can't be extended to the whole of society (due to scalability, entrenched interests, conventions, or whatever), then what's the moral and emotional situation around hiring going to be like?
For example, if hiring for a particular role would elevate dramatically the economic situation of a typical person with that skillset, how do you weigh that motivation to hire as many of those people as you can, against, say, better profitability?
For an emotion example related to that, let's say you can only hire one person, but there are multiple awesome candidates. This is not an unusual situation, and one normally feels a bit bad, but how much worse will you feel, if you're turning people down for a dream job that's "well above market" that they won't find anywhere else? (I'm not suggesting one shouldn't become a doctor because they'll feel bad when they can't heal all their patients, but the question seems worth considering. And maybe the question helps to better understand or articulate what it is everyone believes and wants to do, and what the scope it. Is it explicit that we think such-and-such is a good model for humanity, and we've decided can best tackle that within our little microcosm and whatever example (and market pressure) it sets, and so we're scoping it this-and-that?)
BTW, I'm not so worried about retaining the senior engineers, when the person with the (in some ways harder, some ways easier) job of custodian makes as much money as them. If the salary is good, and the work is good, I suspect there's plenty of highly-skilled engineers who'd want to work in a cultural environment like that. And who knows what all effects that might have, or what other crazy, appealing ideas might be pursued there.