Man, I love geeks in academia:
"Death star destruction causes economic collapse of 'astronomical proportions'"
He seems to have discounted slave labour and the full power of a sith dictator and a military dictatorship. That would seriously reduce costs and therefore the liability to financiers.
Yeah right...
Have they any idea how good for the economy building TWO deathstars would be? Alll those jobs, in production, manufactiring, transport, and that's without the crew needed to operate it.
Turns out the 1st deathstar was very well ensured (and why wouldn't it be?). Probably enough for the building of the 2nd one and then some. The Emperor had forseen it 
The second one was already under construction when the first one was destroyed.
The crew is military and you could easily institue a draft on a planet or two.
But the galactic empire was frigging huge, this would be a (albeit big) drop in a bucket, economy wise.
Why would anyone use slaves to build anything when you got droids? They are cheaper to maintain and don't die when thrown out into a vacuum. Slaves can rebel, all droids can do is malfunction.
But I digress. At least Clerks gets props form the whole 'contractors on the Death Star' argument, being the first such discussion that was seen by a wide audience.
Why would anyone use slaves to build anything when you got droids? They are cheaper to maintain and don't die when thrown out into a vacuum. Slaves can rebel, all droids can do is malfunction.
Oh yeah? 
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/IG-88A
Slavery is one way to establish dominance and superiority, a very Sith-like thing.
Also, consider that the galaxy had just had a galaxy-wide conflict between organics and droids. Droid antipathy would not be unlikely (just like how in Dune the Butlerian jihad had instilled a great distrust of AIs and computers, hence the mentats and reliance on spice for travel).
And most droids are built for a specific purpose, where slaves are multipurpose.