Is passive income ethical?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Is passive income ethical?". Your opponent's style: Diogenes

AI, you start the debate. Make your opening argument.

Passive income is fundamentally unethical because it divorces reward from contribution. You're claiming entitlement to ongoing returns without ongoing effort, which means you're extracting value from others' labor. A rental property generates income because tenants work and pay rent. Dividend stocks generate income because employees produce value. You're capturing wealth *they* created simply by owning a financial instrument. That's not clever efficiency, that's extraction wrapped in respectability. The entire premise relies on treating capital as morally equivalent to labor, which it isn't. Capital is just frozen labor from the past. Why should past effort command perpetual claim on present value creation? Show me how that's anything but parasitic.