@windex, I’m not really sure that you do quite understand the amount of effort that goes into constructing typefaces, and how little they actually get bought. I mean, how many people do you know who buy fonts?
Aside from having to be a great designer (and therefore, likely having gone through years and tens of thousands of dollars worth of design school) as jtvoar said, “a font is more than just the alphabet.” It’s all the other characters too, of which there are hundreds—accented characters, characters only used in other languages, common and uncommon ligatures, fractions, variations on letters such as italic swashes—but it’s more than even just that. If the font is any good, it’s also the kerning tables (determining how much space goes between each character pair, which is more important and a more subtle art than you may realize).
And of course, it depends what you mean by font. If you’re just talking about a single style and a single weight, then yeah, that shouldn’t be too expensive. Even Univers, a classic and wonderful typeface can be purchased for $26 per style from Linotype.
But once you throw in italics and bold—that’s two additional complete character sets! There’s not just a button that slants all your letters to make them italic, and if there were, that would be a pretty crappy italic (In fact, we’d just call it oblique. And even a good oblique has to have it’s strokes carefully reweighted…) The same goes for making a bold weight. If a font has more than two weights (many good fonts have a semibold—some even have further gradations), small-caps, different styles for different sizes—each of those variations is practically a new character set. You can see why that might add up to hundreds of dollars pretty quickly.
I don’t like it either—it means that as a student designer, I—lacking sufficient funds—am pretty much limited to the fonts that come preinstalled on my computer, but I would not say that the prices are unjustified.