Balderdash! Inflation and risk do not round to zero for wage income - wage income for the most part is NOT indexed to inflation and is certainly NOT guaranteed.
This reads like a re-telling of Atlas Shrugged, dressed up for the 21st century but the causality runs from lack of government spending throughout the decades after the Great Financial Crisis. The EU deliberately chose to starve itself of government spending while the US swore off austerity after a very short period. The net result is a debt-to-GDP ratio for the EU around 89% while the US is at about 124%. So for all the clutching pearls about innovation and anti-capitalism, it really comes down to whether the state is prepared to inject demand into the economy via deficits - the US decided it was OK and the EU (mostly Germany) stubbornly stick to their "Schwarz Null" policy of balanced budgets.
Contrary to this thread, the EU needs more productive investment from governments, not less. And while we are it, the dystopian hellhole that the megacap growth tech companies have created in the US (and dominate valuations for the broad US indices) is something the EU should pat itself on the back for having missed.
Here's a more fleshed out version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem. He did acknowledge things like transactions costs etc., which like in can-opener fashion, is typically assumed away by mainstream economists.
That is NOT what Coase was about - his proposition was that if you have well defined property rights, the parties would transact and price out any negative externalities efficiently, without govt. intervention. In this case, the bodies of water are owned by the public, polluters need to pay the public an amount equivalent to the harm caused by the pollution.
With regard to your comment, and since we are on the subject of style, I would rephrase "... only contend on two things" as "... only differ on two things". While it is grammatically correct, it feels awkward.
I don't think this is what you meant to say - have a partial understanding of something is not the same thing as intuition which is more like a "gut feeling".
Andy Grove didn't run Intel the way Paul Otellini did - Boeing had CEOs too before the current crop - it's not just modern capitalism, it's this perverse mutation we seem to have birthed over the last 2 decades or so. That's the theme.
You've totally missed the point of the article - the failure is not idiosyncratic to any one CEO or to an individual manager's failure, it's the result of incentives that put these kinds of CEOs in charge, who then single-mindedly work towards a particular goal - please short-term shareholders. It is very much a theme.