In the real-world you can earn interest based on the amount of money you "invest" in your savings account (like steem-power).

Spending money decreases the value of everyone's dollars (by increasing liquidity, contributing to inflation).

If you could cancel other people's purchases, that action would increase the spending power of everyone else's dollars (by decreasing liquidity and contributing to deflation).

By canceling other people's purchases, you'd be "protecting the value of the 'community' money-pool".

Would you like to live in a world where other people could cancel your purchases if they disagreed with your choices?

If you threw money into a street musician's hat, and then someone kicked over the hat and said "oh, they purchased their spot on the sidewalk, so they don't deserve any tips, and they're not really making a sufficient 'effort' and they just keep playing slight variations of the same song over and over" do you think that would be "fair"?

I'm just trying to understand the moral-theory behind downvoting.

It makes sense to me to downvote CRIMINAL behavior, but all of this downvoting for differences of opinion seems insane (and logically incoherent).

And how does someone "get out of the penalty box"? There doesn't seem to be any interest in giving these "offenders" any sort of "fair-hearing" or providing them some sort of "path-to-redemption".

Ok, I've learned-my-lesson, please tell me what I can do to fix my (-11) rep.