The situation is analogous to a mint for a traditional currency: it costs money to print money, and so some people are getting paid just to maintain the currenc

The situation is analogous to a mint for a traditional currency: it costs money to print money, and so some people are getting paid just to maintain the currency. That's fine, though, because they're creating economic value for the users of that currency. It's similar for the people who "get something for nothing" by mining bitcoins: they're getting paid for making the proof-of-work chain function correctly, and for distributing the initial bitcoin supply in a way that's not based on some central authority handing out bitcoins.