Lol of course. You can make any counter argument for just about anything and we can't 'know' for certain how it would go unless it is first tested. However, stepping back and thinking logically, do you actually believe that is how this is going to play out? I think we both have a pretty good guess as to what is most likely to happen with free downvotes... and that is them being used primarily for personal reasons as opposed to responsible and altruistic curation.

Given that context I highly doubt this change ends up encouraging people to purchase steem and likely is a net negative to both the price of steem and steemit.com.