If the money-for-votes scheme is implemented, those moderators will have a financial incentive to do that.
Why would anyone who isn't a moderator want to participate in that?
In my opinion these kinds of decisions are being made by people who have only interacted with the business side of reddit for a long time. It's ridiculous how out of touch the management of reddit appears to be!
Why didn't they implement a per-user API key with reddit premium and provide a method for any 3rd party app to obtain and use said key? Do they really think they would make more money from advertising than through subscriptions? If they wanted to push their own mobile app, they could make its subscription cheaper than the 3rd party API key. Heck, they could have added a moderator or "extended use" API fee for those people that want to do extra stuff with the API, or more often, etc etc.
I do wonder about the legality of paying people for posts. My ideal situation would be that mods and content creators get paid from the reddit awards something like this: 50% goes to reddit, 25% goes to a user-designated reddit-approved charity, and the final 25% goes to the user.
Then again, I'd also implement comment signing via gnupg so I'm obviously not CEO material.