You can buy shares that give you voting rights in a company, and you can decide to spend (or not) your money with a company. The latter is not available to you with the government and has been shown, I would argue, to have a greater effect over a company than voting in a democracy, and that's as an individual. Maybe that's comparable with picking parties to vote for but it's not quite the same.
I wouldn't trust either form over the other though, and if anything, I'd want their incentives to be set up so they were mostly in opposition so as to limit the power of each other.
If I was to pick an abstract group to trust, it surely would be family first.
> Which is saying that you can only have a "vote" if you're wealthy enough.
No, it's saying you can vote if you buy a share. Are you saying that wealthy individuals in a democracy don't have an outsized advantage in shaping policy and the behaviour of government? But they have the same voting rights as you or me, so there must be something else going on…
> doing that doesn't affect the company's behavior.
You're saying that withholding your money from a company has no effect on its behaviour? Try cancelling a long standing account with a company today, like your phone provider, and see if it provokes any kind of response. You might get a free upgrade out of it.
I wouldn't trust either form over the other though, and if anything, I'd want their incentives to be set up so they were mostly in opposition so as to limit the power of each other.
If I was to pick an abstract group to trust, it surely would be family first.