( incase the poast below is too long to read, the short version is this: thread fails. ktks.)
The economy wouldn't die if there were no botters.
Using your example, you say that if there weren't botters then the price of yews @ 400 would become a lot higher.
This is true.
However, as cost of yews increases, so does the profitibility of getting and selling them. Thus more people cutting logs, thus many more of them in the market, thus easy to get hold of, thus price drops again since not a valuable commodity.
Same for sharks, lobs etc. Where there is a gap in the market that was once filled by RWT bots, it would be filled by regular players wanting to get some easy cash.
And the bot armies are now basically dead btw. The small amount of people botting now don't have any real impact on the economy, but when there were like 500+ RWT bots at one spot that did have an impact. Hence why prices rose after December 07, as commodities became harder to get. Now they are stable again.
Learn how an economy works before you go moaning about how one wouldn't work.
The british empire was built on slave labour. When that got banned, businessmen took over and started using cheap mexican immigrants

. Something always fill a gap in the economy...