All wealth stems from Labor:

Contrary to the oft bantered slogans today, that Capital is the source of wealth, we ought to consider: who are the agents of wealth creation?  The workers of course have a direct input on the wealth gained by capital.  This is especially and obviously true in the manufacturing sector of the economy.  But it should be also noted that capital is required to provide the conditions for the possibility of labor or the creation of wealth.  It might seem that the farmer generated wealth through his crops, by borrowing capital to buy seed, fertilizer, etc, (conditions for the possibility of wealth creation), but something more has to happen at a primordial level.  The farmer has to do something with those conditions for the possibility of wealth, by doing.  That is to say the farmer produces or cultivates.  The seed and fertilizer don’t create wealth in themselves, the farmer is an agent of wealth creation. The manufacturer must use capital to provide space, tools and machinery to accomplish the manufacture, but the laborer must do the work.

Now of course the farmer might speculate on the price of the seed, fertilizer, etc, that he has purchased and wait sufficient time for the price of such to rise and then selling those things.  But this speculation is not real wealth, it is artificial, determined merely by market and inflationary forces.  This is precisely why speculation can generate wealth, but it does not generate anything beyond market and inflation without labor. It is not growth but merely wealth. To truly generate wealth the farmer must work, i.e. labor in the field.

Even those who exploit natural resources for profit, do not gain wealth from capital.  Capital provides the machinery and other conditions for the possibility of wealth, for the extraction of those natural resources.  But there must be some extractor, some labor involved to extract the resource and some labor to sell the resource to a secondary user.  In other words wealth doesn’t simply come from the extraction it must be sold to someone who will use it to manufacture, or fertilize, or otherwise employ the resource.  It is not simply a wealth generation on its own.  Note the word ‘use’ here, because this implies another level of labor beyond the extraction to the generation of wealth.  Note my words here, use, create, employ, generate, extract, produce, buy, sell etc., all of these words imply some kind of labor, some sort of work.