Weirdly American culture has twisted these people into paragons of success while the people who do all the really tough and necessary work are paid poor wages, made to feel like shit about it at the same time and tricked and cheated when they try to unionize.
those people risked capital to obtain that income. There's this idea that capital is "lazy" and people who risk it doesn't deserve the rewards that come with such risks.
No, you are confusing capital with work: you can tell by looking at which of the two is subjected to much higher taxation, which is the concrete evidence that society judges the people doing it as less deserving of retaining the rewards that come with it than the less-taxed activity.
The problem isn't that capital is lazy, it's that the interest rate can't actually reach 0% and the capital market can't actually reach an equilibrium so it is stuck at some low interest rate floor instead of going all the way to 0%.
The idea that your net worth should grow based on how much you own is absurd. You should instead be paid more for your work and then get to increase your net worth that way. That's better for everyone involved except for those who don't want to work at all.
I'm after not building our ideal utopia of work-life balance on the backs of others who, for whatever reason, don't get to have a work-life balance.
Seems a pretty slippery slope.