Murder Through Starvation

>>The quintessential libertarian/conservative/republican
would argue that the system corrected itself,<<

Yes, that principle asserts that it is desirable for an economy to spike and dive repeatedly. I would rather have one designed for moderate swells and dips than one that behaves like a junkie getting high and crashing.

>>Consumers everywhere are paying protection money to wealthy extortionists.<<

This is another big part of why the economy doesn't work properly, and ought to be illegal.

>>It's one thing if an investor puts in money
to make an endeavour possible,
and then gets a share of the profit
for doing nothing else,
or if a middleman
adds value to a product by transporting,
warehousing, or distributing it;<<

To some extent this is true: the extent to which such people take a fair share for their effort. Too many just use it as an opportunity to run the price up.

>>It's semething else entirely when an investor simply
adds a step to the process solely for the purpose of making a profit.<<

And there's a lot of this going on, where people remix investments to shunt the risks onto deliberately chosen victims (as in the housing market crash) or stack layers of transportation and distribution that again just run up the price. It's killing America's small farms, for instance -- almost all the money goes to middlemen, not to the farmers; but the prices for many foods are still uncomfortably high for consumers.