You’re right from the perspective of the business, but from the perspective of the taxpayer it’s not a distinction that is feasible to make.
For example, when a company decides to make a new offering it solicits interest from investors and many investors will become interested in owning stock in the company; but only a fraction of those will actually get stock that is issued in the offering and even these are not buying it directly from the company but rather secondhand from underwriters who were the ones who provided the money directly into the company’s hands; and the remainder of new investors end up picking up stock in the market through dealers. It’s just not a distinction that we can feasibly make for purposes of the tax code and there is no good policy reason to do so either.
That would mean an end to the misnamed 'capital gains' tax.
There is one conservative principle which states that the government shouldn't pick winners and losers. One of the ways that the government tries to do this is by taxing different activities at different rates. If we believe in this conservative principle then there should be no difference between 'capital gains' and wages.
Another conservative principle is that the government shouldn't try to do social engineering with the tax code. Taxing 'capital gains' less than wages is a form of social engineering, i.e. encourages more people to be investors and fewer people to be wage earners.
Another conservative principle is that we shouldn't lie to ourselves. The vast majority of trades have nothing to do with 'investment' in the way economists mean when they talk about 'investing in our future', 'investing in our infrastructure', or 'investing in technology', etc. If we really want to violate the other two conservative principles then we should regulate trades in such a way that we can clearly demarcate true investments from mere speculation. Then we can favor investment over rent-collecting, wage-earning, etc.
Of course we can always throw principle to the wind and be the sort of conservatives that are merely 'pragmatic'. We can look at past history and say that every time something we mischaracterized as a 'capital gains' tax is lowered, the economy booms. But becoming out-and-out pragmatists has its downsides. After all, it is often the 'pragmatic' thing for individuals or businesses to take their profits and use them to lobby government officials rather than invest in R&D, etc. Free market theory suggests that in the long run such rent seeking will ultimately lose out to companies that compete on price, service, and quality of goods.
However when I look at the long run I just see more and more companies acting pragmatically in their own interests directly and indirectly creating an ever-expanding tax code and regulatory environment to the detriment of the economy as a whole.