The entire electronics/computer industry, which has multiplied the productivity of the average person immeasurably, was created by adding intelligence to sand, and a moderate amount of heat and electricity.

The Soviet Union, sitting on natural resources greater than almost any other single political entity, was poverty-stricken. Now look at Japan, or Hong Kong.

What is depressing is that the statements you are making are obviously false on such a simple level, and you are far from the only one I've heard such things from.

Of course, the Marxian definition of value is ridiculous. All the work one cares to add willl not turn a mud pie into an apple tart; it remains a mud pie, value zero. By corollary, unskillful work can easily subtract value; an untalented cook can turn wholesome dough and fresh green apples, valuable already, into an inedible mess, value zero. Conversely, a great chef can fashion of those same materials a confection of greater value than a commonplace apple tart, with no more effort than an ordinary cook uses to prepare an ordinary sweet. These kitchen illustrations demolish the Marxian theory of value - the fallacy from which the entire magnificent fraud of communism derives - and to illustrate the truth of the common-sense defintion as measured in terms of use.

--Robert Heinlein, "Starship Troopers"

I have heard from a lot of people that the life's blood of a typical manufacturing industry are the workers on the assembly lines. I submit that the heart of such industries are those who imagined, designed, and created those assembly lines, machinery that allows a single worker to do a job that could not be done by physical effort alone.

And I repeat that the people teaching you the kind of economic falsehoods you are spouting here are doing so for only one reason: to lay the groundwork that wealth does not belong to those who earned it, and can be morally taken from them.