The corollary of 'Why would people invest in steem when they can't vote their own stuff' is its logical inverse in question form of the statement 'People only invest in steem to make money'. Is it not?

Just because you didn't say something didn't mean you didn't imply it logically.

And in response to that, I would suggest you look at users like @berniesanders and @r4fken who put a lot of money into steem so they could stop people doing things they think are lame. Right there, is a motivation for investing in steem that I already have stated, and I will not state again in my dialogue with you.

I will instead point out that if it were not for such a non-monetary motivation I would not be attempting to show you the folly of your thinking, I am doing this both for your benefit and for the benefit of the community to show that my arguments and justifications are far broader than any weak attempt to destroy them can be, and that you can't just shut down a discussion because you disagree with it.

This is precisely one of the beautiful features of this platform. There is nobody between me and you, this is peer to peer, and all (most) participants desire the record to be kept faithfully. This even starts to dig at fundamental architectural elements of blockchains as a whole.