The Complete Aristotle (eng.)

but having a limit.
X
    And we have found the answer to our original question, Whether
the art of getting wealth is the business of the manager of a
household and of the statesman or not their business? viz., that
wealth is presupposed by them. For as political science does not
make men, but takes them from nature and uses them, so too nature
provides them with earth or sea or the like as a source of food. At
this stage begins the duty of the manager of a household, who has
to order the things which nature supplies; he may be compared to
the weaver who has not to make but to use wool, and to know, too,
what sort of wool is good and serviceable or bad and unserviceable.
Were this otherwise, it would be difficult to see why the art of
getting wealth is a part of the management of a household and the
art of medicine not; for surely the members of a household must
have health just as they must have life or any other necessary. The
answer is that as from one point of view the master of the house
and the ruler of the state have to consider about health, from
another point of view not they but the physician; so in one way the
art of household management, in another way the subordinate art,
has to consider about wealth. But, strictly speaking, as I have
already said, the means of life must be provided beforehand by
nature; for the business of nature is to furnish food to that which
is born, and the food of the offspring is always what remains over
of that from which it is produced. Wherefore the art of getting
wealth out of fruits and animals is always natural.
    There are two sorts of wealth-getting, as I have said; one is a
part of household management, the other is retail trade: the former
necessary and honorable, while that which consists in exchange is
justly censured; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men gain
from one another. The most hated sort, and with the greatest
reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not
from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in
exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest,
which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the
breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent.
Wherefore of an modes of getting wealth this is the most
unnatural.
XI
    Enough has been said about the theory of wealth-getting; we will
now proceed to the practical part. The discussion of such matters
is not unworthy of philosophy, but to be engaged in them
practically is illiberal and irksome. The useful parts of
wealth-getting are, first, the knowledge of livestock—which are
most profitable, and where, and how—as, for example, what sort of
horses or sheep or oxen or any other animals are most likely to
give a return. A man ought to know which of these pay better than
others, and which pay best in particular places, for some do better
in one place and some in another. Secondly, husbandry, which may be
either tillage or planting, and the keeping of bees and of fish, or
fowl, or of any animals which may be useful to man. These are the
divisions of the true or proper art of wealth-getting and come
first. Of the other, which consists in exchange, the first and most
important division is commerce (of which there are three kinds—the
provision of a ship, the conveyance of goods, exposure for
sale—these again differing as they are safer or more profitable),
the second is usury, the third, service for hire—of this, one kind
is employed in the mechanical arts, the other in unskilled and
bodily labor. There is still a third sort of wealth getting
intermediate between this and the first or natural mode which is
partly natural, but is also concerned with exchange, viz., the
industries that make their profit from the earth, and from things
growing from the earth which, although they bear no fruit, are
nevertheless profitable; for example, the cutting of timber and all
mining. The art of mining, by which minerals are obtained, itself
has many branches, for there are various kinds of things dug out of
the earth. Of the several divisions of wealth-getting I now speak
generally; a minute consideration of them might be useful in
practice, but it would be tiresome to dwell upon them at greater
length now.
    Those occupations are most truly arts in which there is the
least element of chance; they are the meanest in which the body is
most deteriorated, the most servile in which there is the greatest
use of the body, and the most illiberal