> Allocating money through the government has not been a particularly successful strategy for improving the overall standard of living.

What are you even basing this assumption on? Just quickly comparing the highest ranking countries by Human Development Index with the highest government budgets per capita and the highest income tax rates would, if anything, support the opposite conclusion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...

https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/personal-income-ta...

Money is votes into the economy and what it shall produce. The more money you have, the larger vote you have. Taxes are the way the government takes controll over a fraction of the votes. Then the government can use this power to make good or bad decisions. One thing which is clear is that the billionaires is not using their power over the economy to fix any of the deep fundamental problems we are facing