Is it fair to earn from referrals?

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I am a member of a site called Wizzley. You publish articles there and are able to earn with Amazon Associates or Google AdSense. They also have this thing where if you refer people to the site (through your referral link) you will get 10% of their earnings for the rest of your life. Not sure if you also get paid for them simply signing up or not. So, I guess you can just refer people to the site, without really publishing articles yourself and make some money that way. That may be a great thing, but you will only earn if they actually publish articles and earn something from them. So, if they publish nothing, or earn nothing from what they publish, you earn nothing as well. I have no referrals on Wizzley but I did have referrals on Wikinut. Back when they paid writers, they also had this thing where you earned a % of the earnings of the people you referred to the site. I had a number of people that supposedly joined Wikinut through my referral link, though I can't remember if I actually had my referral link posted anywhere. Maybe all they had to do was go to one of my articles and then join after that and that would count as a referral. At any rate, I never made anything from any of these referrals because no one bothered to publish anything on the site. So, the fact that they joined through me was useless. I was bummed that they just joined and did not publish anything, ever. On the other hand, is it really fair to earn from what other people publish? They write, edit, etc. and publish articles, which can take hours, and you earn from that simply because you got them to join through your referral link... I am not sure if I am a huge fan of that.