Steemit has a voting system that gives the people voting power proportional to their Steem power. The idea behind proportional representation is that the people how have the most invested and thus the most to lose have more influence over decisions than those who have less invested. This is the same principle that applies to stock companies. The stock company is owned by the shareholders and the owners are the ones who make the final decisions. They have the power to elect a board of directors and the board can hire a CEO. If the company has a total of 100 shares and you own one share then you own 1% of the company and your vote is worth 1%. So, the reward you get will be higher if you get one vote from someone who has 5000 Steem power compared to 10 votes from people who have 100 Steem power each.
According to the Steem white paper, one of the goals of Steem is to create a community that is mostly owned and completely controlled by those with a long-term perspective, the holders of Steem power. This is the reason it takes thirteen weeks to convert Steem power into the liquid Steem thru “powering down”. Another goal is to produce the best discussions on the internet. To have influence on the platform you need Steem Power, to have a lot of influence you need a lot of Steem power. When you vote for content you direct part of the distribution from the rewards pool to the content creator whose content you upvote.
In a democracy like Sweden, for example, the principle is that one adult citizen gets one vote. This might seem fair at first but is it really? If you make money in the free market you are contributing to society by providing valued services or products to others. This is self-evident as the people giving you money in exchange for your work value what they get more than they value the amount of money they pay. This is kind of like creating content on Steemit that people value and upvote. Now, let's say your neighbor is getting subsidies from the government and he plays computer games all day. He doesn't earn any money and he isn’t looking for a job, he is happy being unproductive and he lives a comfortable life on the dole.
You get one vote and your neighbor gets one vote. The idea with voting is that you should vote to make society better and fairer. Don’t get me wrong, I want to have a better society just as much as the next person but the problem is that the government has so much power over so many things. Everyone has needs and wants that might be in line with the betterment of society, might be. Take a politician, for example, he wants to get elected. He knows that people would prefer not to work but still get paid, so he promises to increase the government subsidies for not working. Where is he going to get the money for this?
Well, the government doesn’t have any money, in fact, it owes money. So he can either increase taxes, print money or borrow more. He probably won't increase taxes sense voters who pay taxes tend to not like this and vote for someone else. If he prints money the purchasing power of the people goes down. If he doubles the amount of money the prices should rise by about 100% making people with savings half as wealthy and people with debts twice as wealthy. If he borrows the money it is a promise to raise taxes in the future to pay off the debt plus the interest on it.
As you can see it’s not a good idea to vote for this politician if you are a productive individual. The incentives for borrowing money and not working increases if he gets elected and the incentives for saving, working and investing decreases, this is not in the best interest of society. The computer playing neighbor, on the other hand, is happy to vote for this politician how promises to increase the subsidies even tho it is to his and society's detriment in the long run. If working is punished and not working is rewarded tax revenue will decrease and the government will not be able to pay for everything that the politicians have promised like healthcare, pensions, roads, unemployment benefits and so on. The people who are dependent on the government will be in big trouble when the house of cards comes crumbling down.
Up until 1945 people living on benefits in Sweden were not allowed to vote. Can someone tell me why it would be fair for the person consuming the value to be allowed to vote for someone that takes money from the individual that produced the value and redistribute it to the person on benefits? That would be like taking the Steem from someone who created a highly valued post and redistribute it to someone who hasn't written a single post. I think voting works a lot better in the Steemit ecosystem than in democracy, what do you think?