I like to think my passive income is derived from many years of hard, productive work.
The problem is that passive income can be made exponential. You can use it to acquire more assets which generate more passive income and so on into infinity. With a fixed amount of hard work you can get limitless income. Not much better than the lottery, really.
So you think you can just put a few thousand dollars into an investment, do nothing, and watch it grow exponentially?
Really?
Maybe I wasn't doing it right, but I spent a LOT of time managing my investments. And that, my friend, is WORK, just as much as pushing papers at an office is "work." Frankly, it was harder work than my "job." Plus, of course, I'm putting my money, earned by hard work, at risk, in a way that benefits the economy.
If I put $1,000,000 into a savings account/money market/bonds, etc, I'm doing far more to help the economy than I could if I took a job slinging burgers 24-7 for 80 years. The burger flipper may be burning more calories and may look busy, but his job provides minimal benefit to the economy, but my investment dollars are used to create loans that create dozens of new jobs.
I guarantee the average peasant in Bangladesh "works harder" than the average American/German/Japanese.
That's a country full of hard working people, going nowhere because they have next to no investment capital.
Yet those "freeloaders," as you call them, in countries like the USA, allow for even the poorest American to live a life of luxury that most in the world can only dream about.
Clearly, those investors are providing value, even if you don't understand how it works. Take away that investment incentive, and the economy goes into the toilet, and we become hard working, dirt poor "ethical" non-freeloaders like those in Bangladesh or Haiti or whatever.
Is that what you want?
Just as an aside, most investors work, too. If I was a betting man, I'd bet that, on average, they work harder than the average American.