The wealthy are obsolete and dangerous; we need to move on as a society from the forms that enable them.
Many of them used rhetoric about redistribution to placate the masses, yes. But there was little different but names in the methods for allocating capital in Czarist Russia and the Soviet Union: The decisions were in both cases taken by a privileged elite insulated from the effects of their decisions.
Any mechanism of government can and will be abused. Some such mechanisms like those of centrally planned economies are not only more likely to be abused, but more easy to abuse. Worse, they are so very often employed by the same people who think on the matter and decide we're just going to have to kill the people who don't agree with us.
The only thing that makes us better is if we take those lessons from history as a warning and prioritize liberty first. These mechanisms prioritize equal outcome, which is a fools errand. Doubly so in a leaky economy.
Devil's advocate: the vast majority of productive people do the important everyday work, but don't perform major improvements in the state of the art. What about the inventors of life-changing technology? Would the vast majority of them invest years of their life in it if it only paid the same as getting a normal job?
Empirically, given that academia pays much less than working in the industry, yes.
> the vast majority of productive people do the important everyday work
I beg to differ. Most productive people do completely irrelevant everyday work: optimize or sell ads, or play wall-street poker with other people's money. Very few people do the actually important work (e.g. garbage collectors, farmers, scientists, teachers).
It seems in my experience that most people who invent life changing technology don't do it for the money; they do it because they like to create. Humans have an innate drive to create new things. While I think it makes sense to reward people who contribute to society, those rewards don't have to be unlimited.
How your ideas could operate in other than a totalitarian state is not clear to me because you'd certainly never be able to implement them otherwise - thank goodness.
I know you are just throwing out hypothetical numbers but what kind of wealth distribution would you actually want? Wealth is already much more evenly distributed than the numbers you said you want.
What we say is simple - if you have a million dollars and 100 people to share it - rather than 1 person have 990,000 and the remaining 10,000 divided among 99 we want the 1st person to have 800,000 and the remaining 200,000 to be divided among the 99. That way, the first guy can have his $5,000 wine without paying any extra tax while we have our $50 wine. In the first scenario, the first guy still gets his $5,000 wine but the remaining can barely afford two meals a day.