The Last Rich Man Standing: A Tale

After an election in which their side won, the titans of industry and small businessmen assembled to lay down some new rules. There were 100,000 individuals represented in the new convention, and they decided that since they deserved to keep more of what they earned and contributed to the society, they decided to cut wages and benefits of those who worked for them. This, they assured themselves, would help to increase their personal wealth.
A year later, since the masses had fewer dollars to spend, ten thousand of the original 100,000 had seen their businesses fail, and had had to join the masses at reduced wages working for the winners.
A year later, a similar thing occurred, and twenty thousand more businesses collapsed, but this merely meant more wealth for the the winners.
The next year, thirty thousand businesses failed, and their owners had to join the ranks of the wage earners, at reduced wages.
The following year, all other businesses except one had failed; everyone was now a wage earner, except the last rich man standing.
On that day, a few years earlier, when the 100,000-strong first met, they did something else curious. They wrote on a piece of paper the name of the one person they thought would be the most successful. The last rich man standing found the cache of papers, and read the results. What he found was that while there were several papers with names of those who had failed in the first year, and many with names of those who had failed in the second, and following years, not a single piece of paper had his name on it.