Managers are the wealthy. Corporate governance is a joke, and shareholders are only nominally the "owners" of companies. They're not making the day-to-day decisions and have only very coarse influence over how corporations operate. Much like the voters' relationship to politicians.

It's a mistake to look at per-firm performance. To a large extent, the wealthy are cooperative rather than competitive with each other and collaborate on class interests. The goal is to protect their collective power. They often know each other personally, went to the same schools, sit on each other's boards of directors, and bail each other out when things go pear shaped.

Yeah, politicians share a lot of UMC views because they're UMC. That's not really lobbying though.

Either way, we don't need some marginal or even non-marginal improvement in the tax code. We need genuine, honest-to-god inventions moving the world forward.

Meanwhile, we're inventing fewer drugs and they cost more, more and more people in the academia are making slower and slower progress, tens of thousands of programmers are making slightly better IRC, USENET or Jabber programs. Trends that can't continue, won't.