You bring up an excellent point @meno. I've often thought about this myself, lots of capitalist have probably paid good money to get into this platform strictly for the purposes of capitalizing off of their investment endeavors like bid bots and whatnot.
If these people can be chased off or if their customers are shamed and ridiculed for simply trying to get noticed in the new marketplace then all we successfully end up doing is get them to sell their stake because they can't handle the emotional toll of those who flame them for not being more giving.
I am all for charity. Charity is a fantastic and beautiful thing, but it must be a choice, if it's not a choice, it's not charity at all. It becomes something more sinister like you mentioned communist/socialist. The fact of the matter is Steemit is a community of buskers now and we're all competing with one another.
If you read/listen/watch and enjoy someone's content you should strongly consider rewarding them as frequently as possible in order to foster the growth and continuance of quality content. Yet, if we attack the profiteering type, we might be attacking the value of steem itself by creating an environment where capitalists are driven to dump their stake back to the market. If steem gets the rep of not being friendly to the investors, who will buy the dip?
I don't know, I come from a voluntaryist perspective. I won't even break out the flag tool for the picture of corn. Maybe mine is the right way, maybe it's not. We'd probably never have a Steemian population full of voluntaryists but if we did I wonder how that would effect the blockchain? If we'd have enough do gooders to make the platform a positive place. Or if everyone would just be in it for themselves.
I think even those ardent capitalists would find it in the best interest of the blockchain to reward quality content that they enjoy from time to time. Just because it's good for the blockchain, which translates financially to being good for the future value of steem. I also think that if both sides of these factions realized that if they can create a situation where they are maximizing their steem potential one for charity and one for self gain. Then a single flag by either party cancels itself out meriting no retaliation, because the very act of retaliating takes away from either charity or self gain.
Flagging is like some weird voodoo. You've got a twenty dollar bill in your pocket. You don't like this other guy so you steal a twenty from him burn it and then the 20 in your pocket magically vanishes. It just makes no sense to me. But, maybe in cases of self defense, I don't know.. It's like the three-fold-law that witches observe where whatever energy you put out there comes back at you three fold.
In the case of steem whatever flags you put out there instantly come back at you by draining your mana (steem power). That steem power drained is potential that is lost forever. It could have been used for something you wanted to reward, yourself or others, but it was wasted on a flag which hurt the other person as much as it hurt your own cause.
I recently wrote 'Reward Rape, Reward Pool Rape, Bidbots, and the NAP' you may want to consider giving it a read, I'd love to get your opinion on the matter. It really is difficult to see how this experiment will end or if it will continue on forever and how our actions as individual steemians play into it's long term sustainability.