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 don't know that I'd say it's exactly equal, but the idea that any typical individual really has much say over the Federal Governments decisions is laughable.
Even if it were your local town, city, or county government managing it, do you think they're going to fight the federal government if they ask for access to it? Over you, a nobody, when the Federal Government is going to threaten to withhold money for whatever if they don't?
This is why we need smaller countries in any democracy.
Anything too big isn't democratic as much as political spending, alluring promises (that will be broken), campaigning, making the others look more evil than you, etc etc
