Well I can't speak for everyone but as a small business owner in a highly specialised business with global public companies as customers, I could financially take out more than twice that as pre-tax salary from my company but my takehome would only increase with about $3k so I hardly see any point in taking out more salary. The salary I actually take out is much closer to that of the cashier and I skipped even taking out any salary for Q1 and most of Q2 of this year since I didn't really need the money. I'd much rather reinvest the money into my company so I can expand and employ more people. I also have a goal of providing a better workplace in general, for instance I'd really like to offer 30 hour work weeks and two months paid time off per year, it's not something I can afford at this point in time but I certainly think it would be possible in the future. From my point of view it's more important to be able to build a sustainable business which can offer jobs that provide a high quality of life as well as both professional and personal fulfillment for all employees. And I do think that capitalism is the only way to produce enough quality throughput to achieve that.