Where did I say that?

If Steve got his shares when they were nearly worthless, then lucky him - nearly no taxes. After that normal rules should apply to those stocks. Capital gains tax when sold etc.

The taxes didn't limit how much you could earn. If you managed to earn more, you got more.

Stock does not only represent control of the company. It also represents ownership. So why shouldn't it be taxed? When a person is given stock, he/she should be taxed according to their market value (and I guess on a % of the companies book value in cases where the company is not publicly traded).

So when Steve got his shares, he should have paid income taxes on their value.

That's exactly what's happening. Only the research that is funded by the public must be made available to the public.

I guess you could use the CPU power to have a better AI. Or for doing things like pathfinding in games like Sim City (now if only EA had actually implemented that in Sim City).

Aren't the years you lose the years when you're retired? So the productive period is the same, but the 'leeching' period is shortened for the obese. Or do obese people get to retire sooner?

The lottery. The tickets would cost quite a bit more then the winnings.

That cost is paid by everyone. So the owner of the power plant doesn't really care.

What's more unlikely? That the universe happened by random, or that a being capable of creating the universe happened by random?

But what is the alternative? If the company had been willing to give the money to their users from the beginning, then no lawsuit would have been necessary.
They obviously weren't, so lawyers were involved. They took a disproportionate cut of the winnings, but at least the users got something out of it. Without a class action lawsuit, they could only have gotten their 10$ if they'd been willing to pay thousands in lawyer fees for it.

So if a company patents a gene that results in bigger corn, then anyone that plants that corn on the basis of it's size is guilty?

If anyone should be prosecuted it's the farmers that sold the seeds to the seed elevator. The farmer was just doing some selective breeding on the seeds he paid for.

But this takes time. If your income is 'reasonable', then you can probably get more money by just working more, instead of spending this time trying to reduce your tax burden.

It's only when your income reaches a certain point that avoiding taxes (or paying people to help you avoid taxes) becomes profitable.

I haven't played MoP, but in Cataclysm, the situation was mostly reversed.
It was easy to find a group to do the new raids, but nearly impossible to get into one of the older ones. After all, why bother doing twilight citadel or bwd, when the rewards from instances are absolutely better. So everyone gets to see the new content while the slightly older raids are abandoned. And how would you ever get to see the heroic mode bosses from older raids? Even if you could gather a group willing to try them, the HC raids themselves were several degrees harder then the normal raids of the new tier.
I admit Vanilla and TBC were problematic. In vanilla there was simply too big of a gulf between the gear you could get in instances and raids. And what hurt TBC raiding wasn't so much the gear requirements as the attunement quests - you had to kill two extremely difficult bosses to get access to the new raid (which had starting bosses that were basically free loot dispensers). But at the same time TBC brought badges which could have 'saved' progression. Those were at first only given for beating HC 5 man instances - which were HARD at the time. So you could either do raids, which were semi-difficult but required larger groups, or you could run HC 5 mans and get nearly equal rewards.
Too bad that during Wotlk Blizzard gave into the 'casual' demands that gear should be available to everyone, regardless of skill.
Cataclysm looked like it was going to reverse this trend, since the starting heroic 5 mans were pretty difficult. But of course they once again nerfed them and added new instances that were even easier while giving gear of raid lvl quality.

As I said, 'resetting' the progress with a new expansion is fine - everyone gets a ton of new content to explore, so the HC raiders don't feel ripped off.

What WoW did was reset progress each time a new raid came out. Suddenly everyone had access to items that were BETTER then what HC raiders had just spent the last few months grinding for. New players (well as soon as they reached max lvl, which wasn't much of a challenge in WoW) could do a few hardmode dungeons (5 man, nerfed with each patch until you could almost run through them naked) and get items that were of the same quality as those dropped in raids. While this made hardcore raiding kind of silly, it also killed 'older' raids. Why should people do a basic cataclysm raid, if they could do a simple dungeon and get better gear. And don't even mention trying to get a group for older hardmode raids.

Blizzard did make new content accesible to everyone - at the cost of making older content pointless with each patch.

Raising the lvl limit every 1-2 years wasn't such a big problem. What killed the game for me was that they basically reset progression with every major patch.

Each time they released a new raid, they 'gave' everyone access to items of superior level as those you could previously only get by doing hardcore raids.