Ah, the great fallacy of the free marketeers... that everyone who is rich MUST be highly productive.
In a society of an hundred thousand families, there will perhaps be one hundred who don't labour at all, and who yet, either by violence, or by the more orderly oppression of law, employ a greater part of the labour of society than any other ten thousand in it. The division of what remains, too, after this enormous defalcation, is by no means made in proportion to the labour of each individual. On the contrary those who labour most get least. The opulent merchant, who spends a great part of his time in luxury and entertainments, enjoys a much greater proportion of the profits of his traffic, than all the Clerks and Accountants who do the business. These last, again, enjoying a great deal of leisure, and suffering scarce any other hardship besides the confinement of attendance, enjoy a much greater share of the produce, than three times an equal number of artisans, who, under their direction, labour much more severely and assiduously. The artisan again, tho' he works generally under cover, protected from the injuries of the weather, at his ease and assisted by the convenience of innumerable machines, enjoys a much greater share than the poor labourer who has the soil and the seasons to struggle with, and, who while he affords the materials for supplying the luxury of all the other members of the common wealth, and bears, as it were, upon his shoulders the whole fabric of human society, seems himself to be buried out of sight in the lowest foundations of the building.
Adam Smith, first draft of Wealth Of Nations
Please don't misstate my opinion. I never said everyone who is rich must be highly productive. I merely said that most wealthy people, probably the great majority, were highly productive.
Further, as one approaches a free market (which we are nowhere near having), without government favoritism, it becomes increasingly difficult to grow or maintain wealth without being highly productive. Many of those who, today, are both wealthy and "non-productive" are in fact able to subsist in that way because of government distortions in an otherwise free market. Bankers, who obtain vast wealth through the inflation of the fiat monetary system, are a great example. In a free market, a banker would actually have to provide a valuable service to become wealthy.
The first sentence in your Adam Smith quote is very important, and it has something to do with the last sentence. It is not the free businessman who should be your enemy - it is the violent government, which starts wars, protects its friends, and provides all manner of distortion and corruption upon the public. Remember too that without those "opulent merchants" mentioned in the quote, every one of the 100,000 families would be toiling in the mud. The wealthy did not put the peasants in the field They did, however, enable some to rise above it. The natural state of man is poor, hungry, and cold. It is foolish to see modern society, with all the wealth that we have, and then assume that such wealth caused those who don't have it to remain in that natural state. We would all be there, but for the business man.