Why does Google punish you if spam sites links to you without your knowledge? I dont get it

I was watching that Mat Cutts videos and he never answers any questions, he basically talks about the question without giving people a solid answer.

He claims its so bad websites don't get the knowledge to rank again, if he gives out the ways to actually improve ranking it would make spammers have knowledge to rank up top again and he Google doesn't want the spam or bad sites to get that so they don't give you solid answers.

Its kinda unfair for honest bloggers or websites that play by the rules and never do anything to cheat the system. But like they say a few bad apples spoil the bunch in this case many made for adsense spammers making money in the early days caused this strict and confidential ranking process and ruined it for everyone else.

Anyway, the thing that bugs me is how Google punishes you for other sketchy websites linking to your site that you have no clue about. You cannot control who links to you this is the world wide web and billions of people use it, but it seems Google wants you to go out of your way to find these sites and ask them to remove the links.

I can understand if you know that website and doing a link scheme with them to game the system, but the majority of people HAVE no control of who randomly on the world wide web links back to them. They are basically unjustly punished in rankings by some people they do not know. I recently checked my webmaster tools and clicked links and I saw tons of spammy sites many russian or indian sites linking to me that I had no clue of. I never received a manual penalty but these links were all from weird ass non credible dodgy sites, and my website ranking plummeted in 2012. I had a website in google news it was only in it for like 2 years but im guessing these spam sites would take my website articles and link it to theirs, some of these sites even linked to LA Times and big name websites but those websites have enough traffic that it wouldn't really affect them, while I wasnt a big name site it hit me hard.

I am thinking about giving up on my website, I dont even know if there has ever been any website that didn't have the money to invest who recovered from a algorithmic penalty, plus it takes a lot of time and effort and you are taking a gamble.

Should I just give up on my site, its still in google news or should I just hire someone on Fiverr to help me recover my website I saw some link detox jobs where they claim they can improve your ranking and help give you a complete liste of bad links to disavow for like 80 bucks.

I used to make decent money from blogging back in 2010-2012, but after my site took a hit, I stopped making money. I was averaging like 25-30 dollars a day from adsense ads, and now I am lucky to make 1 to 25 cents a day.

How do you gain the motivation to continue. It made thinks worse when my original articles were getting stolen by another blogger and they ranked higher for my own content than me and I posted it first.