I have peer reviewed various academic papers for Elsevier without receiving any monetary compensation. Moreover, quite small amount of academic papers is read in a printed form, at least among my colleagues.
Where the money goes to?
Ask PLoS, they charge $3k/article for open access publications. How much cheaper do you think Elsevier can be than PLoS?
Nobody needs to pay more, but the publishers should certainly be making less profit. What really needs to happen is the publishers need to be replaced by more efficient ones. See for example Scholastica, who provide the entire journal infrastructure for $10/article. Or the PeerJ, charge just $99/year to publish with them.
The reason is that a scientist not doing this would (rightly or wrongly) have fewer publications in the 'best' journals as considered by the rest of their field and by impact and citation measurements, would therefore be less well known and well cited, and would struggle more to succeed. This is wrong and bad and so on, but it's probably widely true.