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If you build a house which you sell for $100,000, for example, you may understandably think of the $100,000 as wealth, but it is not, it is only money. The house itself is wealth, and the knowledge gained from building it is wealth. If you blow the money foolishly, you may suddenly find yourself in a financial predicament but the house still stands, the family living in it still reaps the benefit of your work, and furthermore having built one you have the knowledge and experience to build another.

It is a cliché to point out, as people often do, that working people generate products worth more than their pay. It could hardly be otherwise. By your work, by the combination of effort and intelligence something is created from out of nothing, or from out of the less-formed world, and that something is wealth. The money exchanged for it is just a marker, a place-holder, a way of keeping track of the wealth produced, but it is not itself wealth..

My efforts to work that out sound a little different. If you build a house then the credit you get for that effort is ownership of the house in the first instance and, when you sell it, you get the price the buyer agreed to credit to you. Why was the buyer able to credit you in a way that matters? Because he had ownership of the scarce money which you accepted as adequate credit for creating the house. Why did he have the money to do that? Because someone else gave him credit for some other action (past or, in the case of a mortgage, future).
And when I speak of "credit" I want people to associate the word with the famous quotation,
Theodore Roosevelt
There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities - all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affection of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves in their own weakness. The rôle is easy; there is none easier, save only the rôle of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds . . .
Because I think that TR's speech is correctly powerful if heard that way.