Most tax systems do recognize that labor is the lifeblood of an economy, and they are designed in a way that will attempt to suck like a vampire on that very lifeblood (VAT & Income Taxes are the two best examples).

Keep in mind that before there can be energy, there must be a well. Before there can be a well, there must be a team of drillers.

You can trace virtually every economic transaction back to its labor element. Nothing is free because everything consumes labor at some point in it's epistimological birth as a product: not even the richest gold mines would be in economic existence without the labor used to remove and process the ore. Even the act of bending over to pick up a diamond that is laying on the open ground is an act in which labor is consumed. And the diamond is worthless unless you sell it to another (an act that consumes labor of both the buyer and the seller).

The consumption of energy, equipment, and capital is only a means to leverage the labor that is consumed in any productive process. And the existence of that energy, equipment, and capital is also only made available through the labor of others.