They may not be taking money out of the system, the system probably creates it as needed.
However think of it this way. Whales get 20 great votes in a 24 hour period. Meaning they can vote 20 times and each user would get the max available for that particular whales vote.
This could be $200 per upvote, or even $2,000 per whale upvote.
Who are they most likely to upvote? You? or their friends who are signing up and making posts? Or even their own shell accounts?
Maybe they give 19 upvotes to friends, and 1 to the public. Who knows.
Some whales are actively trying their best to find and upvote non-Steemit-circlejerk, quality original posts so that the site doesn't swim into a whirlpool of self-congratulation and instead fills its best and highest use, rewarding people for sharing awesome things. At least one large stakeholder has even hired multiple people to find worthy posts for them, and their vote currently carries about $350 in total rewards.
Most of the people with a large stake understand that the value of Steemit determines the value of their own stakes, and are trying to make Steemit the best it can be.
In your case, some users do not believe having an automated message in every post is a great idea, as the noise is drowning out the signal in the comments. I applaud you for crafting a helpful message but I also somewhat agree that there are too many automated bot posts and they need to be discouraged. Downvoting and minimizing these comments is the tool available to discourage it.