It's more nefarious than that. An individual who owns a business naturally wants to increase his profits as much as possible, but he moderates his own activities for a variety of reasons: personal ethics and integrity, the desire to maintain the goodwill of his customers, the need to reinvest some of his profits in the business to guarantee future growth and profitability, etc.

But large companies are owned by stockholders, who themselves are companies owned by stockholders, and so on. There are no capitalists anymore. Likewise, these companies are not run by their owners, but by hired professional managers, employees who have no emotional stake in the business. Business decisions are made in the abstract and carried out by individuals who may not even agree with them. It matters not how profitable a firm is, if the Board desires a 10% increase in profits next year, it's the job of the manager to make it happen, even if he realizes it will cause long-term problems. And he may lose his job if he doesn't make it happen.

In short, this is not so much a question of personal greed (although there is certainly a lot of that!) as there is of a system which operates pretty much as if it had a mind of its own, independent of human conteol. Capital creates its own dynamic, large corporations are the huge collective bureaucracies which small-time entrepreneurs are all so afraid of, but they are not born of government or socialism. And these collectives feed off each other and the consumer and their stockholders and on smaller businesses and their employees with about as much concern for the welfare of society as locusts have for theirs.

And is there any control of them? Yes eventually, the market brings them down, and they collapse into bankruptcy or are gobbled up by other firms which dismember them into their component proteins. But in the meantime, the devastation left in their wake is incalculable. Today, these meltdowns can cause entire nations to collapse.

And the executives who survive, well...they are professionals, samurai, hired guns. They collect the huge bonuses they negotiated before they took the job their own training told them was going to last only a short time, and they go looking for another one.