Everyone whines about HFT, but don't realize that it actually does add liquidity. It also means that the people trading do take their risks, and have to pay for them. It's a fair trade. LFT (Low Frequency Trading), is not necessarily any better. The AMEX used to have "specialists" that were on the floor who were supposed to make sure that the trading happened smoothly, what actually happened was that the "specialists" were basically given the right to "skim" off the top, just like HFT traders do. Before everything was electronic, orders would hit the exchange and the specialists had a chunk of time to decide on what they wanted to do. In that time, they would see what was going on in the market, and make sure they could do both sides of the trade and make the bid ask spread. The difference between then and now is that then they had special privileges that no one else had.
Then there's the fact that the stock exchanges in the US almost stopped in the 70's because they were too slow. No one could keep up with the paperwork. That's when the DTC was created http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depository_Trust_%26_Clearing_Corporation. If you think trading was more scrupulous then than it is now, you are out of your mind.
Frankly, if you don't like the stock market, don't put money into it. I personally find it hard to put money into a company I really know nothing about. If you do enter the market, via a broker or your 401k, then you should be happy it's as efficient as it is. It costs fractions of a penny for each share as a transaction cost. Compare that to your house, which probably ran 3-6% for just the brokers fee, then lawyers, then all the other closing costs. You could do a similar transaction of hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock on the stock market for next to nothing and if you put in a limit order, you won't lose anything to the HFT traders.