I'm not sure you understand what fair means. It doesn't mean good for ninjaminers. It doesn't even mean profitable. Your statement of reasons it's fair simply don't address fairness at all. It's not fair for folks to make Steem out of thin air and then tell folks if they want some they have to buy it. It's apparently legal, but that doesn't make it fair.

But let's discuss your rationale for buying Steem. Joe.user comes on Steem looking forward to the phat upvotes he's sure his dank memes will earn him, and is disappointed when no one upvotes or comments, except Steemcleaners because he didn't make the memes himself, so now he's a plagiarist. He's supposed to think 'well, if I buy $millions of Steem, I can just upvote myself!'

But, he didn't come here to pretend to admire himself, he came here to be admired by others, and he's not a millionaire, he's a NEET that steals memes from iFunny. How's he gonna buy enough Steem to make self voting worthwhile, and why should he overcome his innate revulsion to doing so? More importantly why should we encourage him to do so? No one in the market is going to benefit from his self voting, except the ninjaminers who sold him the Steem. His impact on the price of Steem is negative, because he's reducing the rewards of content creators by taking them for himself. He's not upvoting anyone else with it, that would reduce his ROI. If he delegates to a bidbot he only encourages vote buyers incapable of generating interest in their content organically, and again, he's extracting rewards that would otherwise go to good content creators.

I don't even understand what his motivations are supposed to be in that scenario.

What link between ninjaminer Steem purchases and income increases do you think exists? The ninjaminers sure aren't buying Steem, except maybe to enable pump and dumps. They are probably the only substantial stakeholders in Steem today that are not in the red, and only because they paid nothing for their stake. You'd have to go back years to get to Steem price below what it is today, and the time value of money doesn't put buyers then in the black now. They're in the red too, because if they'd have invested those funds in sound ventures they'd have made a better return by now.

Investors that actually have $millions to invest are likely to have some ideas about how investment should be undertaken, because either that's how they got $millions, or that's what they were taught by whoever they inherited it from. What they likely understand is capital gains, and self voting is a far sight different.

Again, I'm not seeing what their motivation to undertake profiteering is.

The extant world and the people in it didn't just erupt from spacetime fully formed. The history known to folks in this world includes the proven success of capital gains at increasing wealth for those that do it right, like Warren Buffet who became the richest man in the world thereby, and creating, building, and maintaining civilization itself is a byproduct of capital gains in a very real way.

Somehow these people in this world are supposed to be attracted by the idea of self voting and profiteering where all the examples of that revealed in history are offensive to society, and destroy the companies and lives of their workers that have built the civilization of which they are part.

Well, it hasn't worked in the last three years, and I don't see why it will anytime soon.