Does your anger extend towards the domain name companies? Webhosts? After all, running on free software and 'cheap' commodity hardware - Dreamhost probably make the same figures you're talking about, and they don't have a lot of the large up-front an annual costs. Just an example, really.
To address each point: Validation - not a fixed cost. Some can take several real man-hours to complete, and additional costs of access to third-party databases, translation costs. I see it possible to make a loss on some certs purely in validation.
Legal costs - insurance premiums for something this specialised are high, regardless of how many claims made.
CA chaining - as per other comments, you're lookat at potentially $50K a year just in audit costs, just to get into the mainstream browsers, with a 5-10 year wait to become ubiquitous enough to be commerically viable. You can pay to get a sub-CA and bypass this step, but it will cost...you can go into 7 figures annually.
Again, I'm not attempting to make excuses. I do agree some certificates are overpriced. I am just trying to show how the CA industry is no more a 'racket' or 'license to print money' than many more of the internet-centric businesses that exist, even though it may seem that way without insight.
Plus, it keeps me gainfully employed :)