[VanillaLime]

> So, before capitalism, people didn't build widgets?

Sure they did, at sustenance level. Or do you think that the noncapitalist economy of preindustrial Europe could produce enough widgets to sustain the modern standard of living?

>My point is that labour does not need capital to produce value (Although access to capital can increase the amount of value labour can produce.) Capital without labour is, quite obviously a lame duck.

This is looking more and more false by the day, to be honest. At this point, companies that employ hundreds of thousands of assembly line workers that produce "actual value" are less profitable than companies that automate that same assembly line using capital. On the flip side, the return to human capital in the form of educated workers has certainly increased.But I challenge you to build Google or Facebook without the venture CAPITALists who provided the money to purchase the infrastructure and hire the labour. The knowledge economy is great, but at some point the software still has to run on hardware purchased with, you guessed it, capital.

The point being that capital and labour are both necessary for a functioning economy, and concluding that labour is the only thing that matters and that anyone rich must be a rent-seeker leads you to becoming Venezuela or Argentina.