Comment by hinkley

Percentage wouldn't necessarily be so bad, except that there's a certain base cost to setting up and running all of those systems. At some point getting someone to up their spending 10% has very little incremental cost. It would be far cheaper than trying to reduce overhead.

So now you have perverse incentives on perverse incentives.

And if you don't look at it too closely then you can feel good about all the money you're making helping people slowly self destruct. Your parasitism is perfectly justified by the mad stacks of cash you're making.

There's only two ways to get that much money. Do something really really good (at which point you probably will give a lot of that money away), or do something really really bad. If your company has to talk about 'evil', it's probably in the latter camp and always has been.