A man who owns his own business worries about it's long-term reputation and viability, perhaps even designing it to survive him. Pride and honor, the craftsman's virtues, come into play. Most large businesses today are bureaucracies owned by other businesses, banks, stockholders, holding companies, pension funds, etc, and managed by nomadic professional executives on salary. They are not personal expressions of a man's livelihood and committment. They are machines for making money operated by hired guns, samurai and mercenaries.

A CEO has responsibilities to the Board and the stockholders, and is often under great pressure to maximize short term gain as much as possible. Even a man of great personal integrity and competence is constantly being reminded he is an employee who has his instructions and he had better follow them. Why do you think these guys negotiate golden parachutes? They know if they don't please their masters it may be years before they work again, if ever. And their masters are not people, they are soulless collectives who only care about maximizing profit and growth and that have insulated themselves from the consequences of short-term thinking by diversification, leveraging, insurance, bundled debt and hedging their bets. Add to this the inevitable consequence of an economy that finds financial manipulations less risky, more profitable and even more prestigious than actually producing a product and competing in the market, and the results we see around us today are really not all that surprising.

I don't fully agree with your conclusions about taxes, investment, and growth. But I do believe you are on to something: after all, those "questionable financial instruments" you talk about are precisely what we are relying on now to provide the financing our economy desperately needs to function.

The laws of the market are unforgiving, but they can be slow. The richest individuals in the world today are those men who understand this system and earn phenomenal incomes by having learned how to game it, short-circuit it, and frustrate its checks and balances. Sooner or later they always lose, but sooner is what matters, isn't it? Later will take care of itself.

However these Magister Ludi do not have all the money. There are so few of them that their combined incomes are actually insignificant. The real wealth never existed in the first place, it's all paper circulating in the financial system, where it has been fueling a bogus prosperity based on debt and vapor.