@flowersonthepiano wealth can be created entirely without exploiting the labour of others. You could paint a picture, record an album or write a novel. In short you put something in the world that others value and profit from it. Simples.
It used to be not all that long ago that most of a countries population was tied up in the simple process of growing the crops, and tending to the animals that fed everyone. As we began to mechanise agriculture we freed up greater swathes of the population to work in industry and thus we got the industrial revolution.
Again we stand on the threshold of a technological revolution with automation and communications technology rendering many jobs obsolete. Ideally humanity will all become collectively freed to examine and ask of themselves what sort of value they can bring to and put into the world, and accrue the benefits commensurate with their successes.
If we are going to talk about exploitation a man or woman who starts their own business takes the greatest risks and the successful ones will often be the first there in the morning and last ones leaving at the end of the day. So the very idea that they are not 'working' and not 'working class' is a dangerous piece of obsfucating propaganda. Why should their labour be exploited to provide for other people?
If you are talking having a social safety net I'm 100% in favour of having one, but I'd prefer one that was mostly voluntary through private charities, and not the current one that is enforced at the point of a gun. The system we have now also stigmatises, and traps people.
By concentrating resources in the hands of the most capable you get two things: more wealth inequality, but on the flip side you get way way more actual wealth to go around. Just since the 70's and 80's we have gone from 50% of the global population subsisting on a dollar a day to around 22-23%. This is due mostly to free market ideas opening up in China and India. As distasteful as it might be under a socialist worldview this is clear and away the most moral and ethical paradigm to promote when working with actual reality and not utopian daydreaming, and it is imperative that we do so.
Just to be clear we have never in the history of humanity recognised fully the economic contributions of women. Yet in truth if every woman stopped every hour of unpaid labour that they do for one year the whole world would collapse in a matter of months if not weeks. It baffles me how women are presented as an economic drain and more often than not stuck in the welfare trap.
I'm only recently educating myself on economic theory, but to my mind economics is all about the value you add into the world. Yet we render women's output invisible, but you can only make that equation work if you see humanity as essentially valueless, but it is impossible for that to be true for if humans have no value, then nothing has value and the whole logic self detonates philisophically, as it is humans that assign value to things in the first place.
I may need to delve into the complexities of the foundations of economic theory of which I still need to do a vast amount of study, but I'm currently theorising that the imperfections of capitalist/ free market principles come mainly from making women's output invisible.
I know we've had feminist academic analysis of history, literature and many other subjects, but I think one is very much needed for economics.