If there were two equally positioned buttons one for upvote and another one for downvote then you would be right.

When one is called FLAG people naturally assume that it is to be used to penalize someone for bad behavior, like spam, scam, violations of rules here and so on and certainly not a simple innocent downvote.

When someone flags you for no reason other than that someone wishing you to earn less money, yes it maybe perceived insulting, offensive and taken personally because in the mind of the authors they didn’t violate any rules and didn’t deserve to be “flagged”.

Also I have an issue with your approach because of reputation. When you donvote/flag someone their reputation suffers as well. So it’s not only your disagreement of how much you think they deserve to be paid. You are damaging their hard earned reputation and it is a big deal and a good reason to get personal.

There is a huge difference between disagreeing with someone’s position and to disrespecting the person stating it. Flagging is associated with disrespect. If done without very strong reason other than payment consideration it feels defamatory too.

If you could RESPECTFULLY downvote without affecting reputation then I would partly accept your position.

Let’s say you have a very smart opponent whom you respect but just don’t agree with their position let’s say on politics, religion etc and but the person is making very logical arguments to which you can’t say anything proving them wrong, you just don’t like it... and then instead of respectfully disagreeing you come and smash the person in the face.

This is how it Coomonly felt here when someone downvotes for no apparent reason, as it seems to the majority.

Hope you can see the difference.