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Over the years, my standard approach to analyzing corporate profits has been to think of them as the last slice taken from a big national income pie.\xa0 The growth of the pie itself is important.\xa0 But so is the size of the other slices, such as labor costs, interest costs and corporate taxes.\xa0 Once every one else has had their slice, what\u2019s left over is corporate profits.\n\xa0\nIt\u2019s a useful model for analytical purposes.\xa0 However, it has one glaring flaw, namely that it assigns to corporations a purely passive role, meekly accepting the slice left after all the other factors of production have taken theirs\u2019. In reality, American corporations are muscular and sharp-elbowed, growing profits by enhancing productivity but also by beating back the demands of labor, lobbying for a more favorable tax and regulatory environment and seducing customers into buying more goods and services than they really should, based on sober calculation.