Generation or so back in the USA that was the the general over-the-rainbow vision of where technology would take us.
The robots would do the work while people would afford more time to spend on leisure/artistic oriented lifestyles.
1. Put a 1000% tax on advertising spending.
2. Taxed property at a much higher rate, but gave each person a basic income.
3. Set a ceiling for the ratio of funds that education institutes can spend on non-professor things. (At least here in Canada they waste most of the money on things that don't actually teach skills, they just look impressive or market the university in some other way.)
4. Set caps on how much individual patents or works of art could earn before they lost financial protected status.
5. Set corporate taxes as a function of in-country sales and total affiliated market cap.
6. Punished corporate region shopping for tax havens and other advantages with trade agreements.
7. Made public healthcare optimize on happy person-years saved and with emphasis on prevention.
8. Make more areas that are 7 storeys tall so people can walk or bike to get their daily things.
9. Set high taxes on cars and invested in high speed city-to-city trains.
Then we'd have houses that were safe, but affordable. Cities that had some quiet areas, but were dense enough to be viable for everyone. Great education via well-paid professors and TAs. Reasonable returns in investments in technology and art, without Walt Disney and other soulless corporations milking the same characters year after year. Products that competed mostly on quality instead of advertising.
Instead we have almost the opposite. Nobody can afford anything because property gets sucked up into mortgage fuelled bubbles and in classes of 100 people where each person is paying $40k per year after subsidies we have professors and TAs struggling to get grants to fund their research.
Why? A single course for a four month term is $350–$500k worth of product. Where did all the money go?
Same place all the money always goes: Competition for the best students to get the best reputation to get the best students to get the best...
Also, I don't believe in high taxes across the board and funding everything with the government. I primarily want the state to stop arms races. It's not like I want them to take over shoe manufacturing, for example.