Genuine response here: From a strictly utilitarian/consequentialist perspective, capitalist systems has proven to be pretty good at improving the quality of li

Genuine response here: From a strictly utilitarian/consequentialist perspective, capitalist systems has proven to be pretty good at improving the quality of life for everyone. You're suggesting essentially eliminating medium-to-large prizes for succeeding in that system. Destroying those incentives strikes me as being fairly risky. You could end up causing more harm than good. An interesting thought experiment to go through might be to compare two worlds: One in which we do as you suggest, and another where we continue on with the current system. In your world, we might use the extra taxes to fund a medicare-for-all style healthcare system, free college tuition for everyone, and perhaps some large infrastructure program. More people have better health care coverage, would go to school for free, and be able to subsist on government-funded jobs. However, innovators, investors and entrepreneurs would be curbed back -- we get less technological innovation, fewer improvements in communication, education, medicine, technology, food production, travel, etc. It's difficult to predict what kinds of technologies we would miss out on, but it could be massive. Would we miss out on an important cancer drug? Or perhaps the solution to climate change? Or maybe we would miss the boat on AI-driven cars? As a heuristic, it seems to me that the biggest improvements in the quality of life of humanity so far have come not from socially engineered programs, but have rather come from entrepreneurs and inventors. It seems unwise to take our foot of the gas in that regards.