It depends on what you mean by free market, it's often used interchangeably with with laissez-faire capitalism but an important concept in a free market is that the barrier to entry for new competitors should be as low as realistically possible, so regulation that prevents vendor lock-in can be pro free market.
You're only saying this because you don't like the outcome of economic research. So called "soft" sciences are the best way to get close to the truth in those fields even if it's harder to get undeniable answers.
A lot of these things can scale vertically rather than horizontally. If you allow denser housing by building higher, schools and hospitals can also build higher.
Namedtuples also behave like tuples, which is great when you want to incrementally turn tuples into classes but if you want an easy way of creating classes, it's probably not a good idea to have them behave like tuples. Plus dataclasses have more features.
The book "Why nations fail" makes the claim that centralized institutions (among other things) are necessary for building a prosperous country. It's a very interesting read.
Absolutely not, they protect current renters, not people with the lowest wages, people with the shittiest jobs have been priced out already. Rent control protects the millionaires renting in Mayfair as well.
I don't support policies that actively entrench the status quo. I'm for taxation that's as high as possible without causing too much negative impact on investments. We're having a conversation about rent control here though, that's why I only talk about rent control, in a conversation about taxation, I'll talk about taxation.
There's a limited supply of housing in those high demand locations, not everyone who wants to live in London can live in London because there just isn't enough units, with that limited supply, housing should go to the people who need it the most, like the people who have jobs in those locations.