> Also Vanderbilt and Carnegie existed during a time of much higher taxation

My bad, I was under the impression that the corporate tax rate was higher in the 1910s->1920s

> Your engineering manager or CTO doesn't write code yet is paid more than you. There's value in directing labor and capital, and putting them together in a prudent way.

I think the main question is how much of this can be measured and what is it worth? Sure it has value but I personally don't think the value is quantitatively different in a way that justifies the huge pay difference between execs and laborers, nor qualitatively different in a way that makes CEO pay be in ownership. I think that these distinctions are more to enforce a class system. If the idea is that a CEO's performance is tied to share price, therefore they should be rewarded in shares, then why doesn't that logic extend to all workers?

> For another measure, look at the GDP (again, PPP) per capita

GDP per capita doesn't really mean much because of averaging, I will address the median though:

> For median disposable income per person (adjusted for purchasing power), the US tops the list

Here are the numbers I found where US is third:

https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/45ae3dae-en/index.html?i....

Disposable income is post-tax. I would like to see normalization where we take things like education, healthcare, housing, and childcare costs that are covered by social democracies and add that to their disposable income, or subtract it from ours. We could even factor in household debt. Even better would be to take that normalized score and divide it by working hours. There's also the question of personal freedoms, how much agency does an individual have in their workplace, in the home the own or rent, wrt healthcare, etc. There is more to qol than just having money to spend.

> Most of them are some combination of a tiny tax haven or a petro-state

I think that the US being the world's reserve currency affords us some sort of status akin to being a tax haven or petro state, no?

> Where is your evidence that higher taxation and more redistribution would lead to a better outcome for the median person in the US?

I think this is a bit of a loaded question. I think the median person is decently well-off in the US barring some medical catastrophe. I think the question should be how to improve the social mobility chances for those below the median. I can't be bothered to look them up now but there are plenty of studies where you can see the effects of social spending on the earning power and life outcomes of people. It's a pretty simple idea that if you give poor people access to the same education and networking opportunities as wealthy people, they will perform better. Anecdotally, I find it a lot easier to take risky career moves now that I have a safety net of savings under me than I did when I was making $12/hr.

Lastly I think you only need to look back as far as the 40s-60s under managerial capitalism to see the effects of higher taxation and more investment in productive sectors of the economy plus housing/schooling. I think most people here would agree that our current economy has been propped up by debt and currency manipulation.