it's fair in the technical sense, since the users are the ones to set it up when observing how congested the network is, allot prefer to pay up to $0.50 more cents to get it confirmed instantly rather than waiting for days..
But we are forced to pay more because if we don't our transaction will be stuck. It is like we do not have a choice but to pay high fees just to make our transaction confirmed.
That is the weakness of bitcoin and we are looking forward to activating the UASF and 2mb block. If everything goes well, bitcoin will goto the moon