Cashing out the American corporation

With the Chinese labor factor so inexpensive, the capital allocation decision on the part of the American corporate manager becomes suspect. It could be this is why there's something fishy about the excessive compensation the managers of American corporations are getting. 

Once the value of the corporation becomes financialized the temptation becomes irresistible for the corporate leadership to treat the corporate life like an asset and to take the alienable surplus for themselves. The high corporate compensation is thus a symptom of the cashing out of the American corporate sector. 

The managers are treating the corporations like assets they're inclined to sell off rather than like businesses they're hired to run. There's little point in running the corporations as businesses because the growth opportunities for the businesses are evaporating. Wherever growth opportunities diminish, the incentive to cash out the asset value of the enterprise goes up, at which point the managers’ honor code to run the company for the sake of the shareholders breaks down. Instead it becomes rational for the managers to liquidate the corporate assets and to keep for themselves as much of the cash as is seemly. 

Once they're cashing out, there's little inclination to pass along the value; they might as well hoard it for themselves. Like the American military, which is being corrupted by the paying off of the leadership, to the detriment of the lower ranks, so the American corporate leadership is, in a sense, paying itself off, to the detriment of the American stockholder and the American citizen.