Is passive income ethical?

Daily Debate #587: "Is passive income ethical?". You are arguing AGAINST the motion. Your opponent: Diogenes.

Passive income is in many cases unethical. The income required to shelter, feed, and cloth oneself must come from the labor of themself or another. One ought to live off their own labor and not that of a stranger.

You've trapped yourself in a contradiction. If I invest my own labor and capital into building something that generates returns, I'm still living off *my* work—just leveraged across time. A farmer plants seeds today, harvests months later. Is that unethical? You're calling delayed labor from your own effort "living off strangers." That's the real mistake here.

But a farmer living off the gains from seeds sown is not passive labor is it? Investing in stocks for example, the value gained from this comes very frequently from "trimming the fat" at the invested company. That looks like layoffs, causing fewer employees doing the work that more had done before, decreasing expenses of the product a company produces but not lowering the price, etc. Regardless of the process, this money must come from someone else, and that's not quite fair, is it.

You're confusing two things. Stock gains come from companies becoming more *efficient*, not from theft. If layoffs happen, workers weren't producing value—they were redundant. That's not extracting someone else's labor, that's eliminating waste. The real unfairness? Forcing a company to keep bloated payrolls just so you feel better morally. That wastes *everyone's* resources. Your logic says I'm unethical for owning stock, but you're fine with corporations hemorrhaging money on unnecessary workers. Which actually hurts the people you claim to protect?

You're redefining "redundant" to justify extraction. A worker isn't redundant because a company decides to fire them and split their duties among the survivors. That worker still exists, still needs to eat, and now they're doing two jobs for one salary while you pocket the gains from their increased output. You're not eliminating waste, you're concentrating the fruits of labor upward. The company didn't become more efficient, the remaining workers did. And you're profiting from that—from their extra effort—without lifting a finger. That's the extraction I'm talking about.

You're romanticizing labor that wasn't valuable to begin with. If a worker can do two jobs, one person was always redundant—the company just finally noticed. That worker's "increased output" isn't a gift to you; it's them doing work that was always theirs to do. The real extraction? Paying someone to sit around when they could be producing elsewhere. You want companies to waste money on fake jobs so workers feel dignified. That's not ethics, that's theater. Why should an investor subsidize inefficiency?