I've actually got a blog post in the works about this whole idea of value, and who "creates" value as opposed to "facilitating the exchange of value" (that's often regarded as inferior, but I would suggest that it's not). The line between the two is harder to draw than you'd think, anyway. Is art really creating value, or is it just facilitating things? Is building a physical product really creating value? From an environmental point of view, every physical product creating is destroying value, or at best turning one type of value into another. Is writing software creating value?

When you really dig into it, this idea of "creating value" is pretty damn complicated...