Profitable or not, this sounds a lot like excusing someone who stole $150 million from others by not following the law - that, even if he did steal it by breaking the law, this $150M is not the source of his wealth. It appears to the judge of the court as well as to the press and to many observers from the public that he utilized that vast wealth to avoid any significant consequences for this great theft.

You do make excuses for those with capital who break the law, and even here you judge people's actions differently based on how much capital they have - if that $150M were the source of his wealth, your arguments would be different! Even though the actions would have been the same.

Would it be honest to simply state that those with vast wealth are the smartest, fittest, best humans among us and deserve deference from the rest of society? Vast wealth could then be a very convenient proxy for who should be granted the most power in our society, because they are the smartest, fittest, and best of us. They are smarter and better, so they would be the most adept at wielding that power - thus we should grant them as much power as possible so that it is all concentrated in the best hands.

My core thesis remains the same: An individual's captured/extracted value likely exceeds net value creation when examining the individual outliers who capture the most value. Therefore it is reasonable to tax them at a higher rate, to recapture some of that excess extracted wealth which went above and beyond their net wealth creation.

I would also say that even in the purest hypothetical case, it is reasonable for a society to decide not to grant 100% of all net created value to the individuals who created it, and for the society to capture some of it for broader societal purposes. I think reasonable people can agree that there would be real problems inherent in living in a world where the most extreme limit of income inequality is manifested - most of those problems would be related to concentrating power in the hands of those who break the rules to maximally enrich themselves.

This is all in line with my original assertion that the optimal choice between "maximizing greed is best!!" and "everyone should earn exactly the same as everyone else no matter what!" is....probably somewhere in between those two extremes.