Production Action, if successful, attains the end sought. It produces the product. It is a transformation of given elements through arrangement and combination. The producer is not a creator.
Man is creative only in thinking and in the realm of imagination.
In the world of external phenomena he is only a transformer. All that he can accomplish is to combine the means available in such a way that according to the laws of nature the result aimed at is bound to emerge. At a still earlier date the French Physiocrats contended that all labor was sterile unless it extracted something from the soil. Only cultivation, fishing and hunting, and the working of mines and quarries were in their opinion productive. The processing industries did not add to the value of the material employed anything more than the value of the things consumed by the workers.