The political wrangling obscured the real issues underlying a question that has occupied economists and tax experts for many years—whether individuals should pay any taxes at all on capital income. Strange as it may sound, most economists would agree that having zero taxes on capital income is theoretically the best thing to do.
Several studies even demonstrate that, from the point of view of maximizing economic growth, the long-run optimal taxation is zero. Milesi-Ferretti and Roubini (1994), for instance, show that under very general assumptions the optimal tax burden on labour and capital income is zero. Jones, Manuelli and Rossi (1993b) and Bull (1993) add that even consumption taxes ought to be equal to zero ... no such thing as a progressive tax system should be allowed to exist. More precisely, as Sir Mirrlees (1971) showed, the marginal tax rate at the highest level of income should be zero. And finally, in our eyes, there should be no capital income tax.
Climate coolness is good, if one is producing a lot of heat. With nuclear energy, within a few centuries, humanity could easily be producing one million times as much heat as it produces today. In such a scenario, it might be helpful to have less Greenhouse Effect.
If there weren't surging rents displacing people, why would there be rent control?
Because politicians try to appease renters, who in turn tend to wrongly assume that "rent control" is something that would benefit them. A prevalent assumption among renters seems to be that if a given thing is bad for landlords, it must automatically be good for renters. For example, when landlords back advertisements against rent control measures, that is actually given as a reason by "tenant's rights" advocates to vote the opposite way.
By the way, the rest of the "tenant's rights" -- including any kind of tenant rights -- also contribute to homelessness and high rent prices. Also contributing are building codes, construction codes, use codes, etc. Without any of those, apartments would necessarily be dirt cheap, and there would be no such thing as homelessness.
Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics. In the chapter on price controls, he argues that rent control (and price controls, in general) cause shortages where there is no scarcity of the underlying commodity.
Price controls also prevent productive individuals from accessing the resources that they otherwise use to produce surplus resources -- thus making everyone poorer.
2) Evolution works by successive generations. If people live so long that they do not have a need to reproduce very often, then interesting evolutionary consequences will arise that I can only dimly speculate on. Seems like while the humans are in a blissful state of ageless biological stasis, other species will still be evolving
Being immortal does not prevent an individual from reproducing. If they did breed, the future-evolved species spawned from them would simply have antique hardware hanging around.
Demand is constrained completely by a venue's capacity
This is an example of the "We Have No Competition" fallacy. It is a fallacy because substitutes for the demand are possible. In the present case, substitutes could take the form of events on other nights at the same venue, other existing venues, new venues, venue expansion, virtual venue axpansion via remote-viewing technologies, recording for later viewing, etc.
Also, your stateside cocaine kilo prices are off by more than 10 times, even factoring in the recent price jump. Here are the latest news stories mentioning stateside prices:
http://news.google.com/news?q=kilo+of+cocaine+costs
You used to be able get about $18000 for a key (kilogram, or 2.2 pounds) of cocaine. New you’re seeing prices of $27000, $28000 per key. That’s a big jump. ...
one kilo of cocaine ... $4,500 ... On the streets ... between $200,000 and $600,000. ... Claritin ... $215.17 Cost of general active ingredients: $0.71
Your analogy does not work, because it compares two regulated items (cocaine and Claritin), instead of one regulated item vs. one unregulated item.