All new episode! Click to share: http://ctt.ec/myUJ0 In this episode of EconPop, Andrew discusses the animated hit comedy The LEGO Movie. Subjects include em…
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25 Responses to “EconPop – The Economics of The LEGO Movie”

  • EconStories:

    No Rules. No Government. No Babysitters. No Bedtimes.
    #EconPop reviews the Economics of The LEGO Movie. 

  • Darvinisti:

    Communist Soviet Union? If you would take the time to actually see what the
    USSR stands for you might notice some inconsistency in your claim. The
    Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a union of socialist republics. Not
    a union of communes. It was a socialist regime.

    There is no top down management in communism.

  • Kyle Durfee:

    The points in the video are valid in today’s society, but as we get better
    at collecting, organizing, analyzing, and manipulating data, should we
    eventually transfer to centralized planing? By the sound of this video, the
    primary defense for plans by the many is that we just haven’t gotten good
    enough at gathering and using data to do it from the top down, but I think
    we’re already catching glimpses of analytics being able to preemptively
    identify our needs, desires, and preferences.

    I think we’re going to need support for free markets based on deeper
    principals than simply the free market currently doing a better job than
    the alternative if we want to keep that version of free will around.

  • edgy1004:

    Is the fire department an example of central planning too? My taxes pay for
    that. We couldn’t all, as individuals just get together and build
    interstate highways. I wouldn’t want a private company to take over either
    of these because I would like equal access to these service independent of
    my income. In a completely free market one visit from the fire department
    would cost $5,000,000.00 because of supply and demand. Oversight is
    necessary. I think most people would agree that excessive oversight and
    regulation is bad but you take it too far when you fail to acknowledge the
    huge failures in this type of libertarian idealism. 

  • Gregers Larsen:

    However, free market economy is not without its faults, most notably short
    sightedness. When dealing with areas such as environment, infrastructure
    and energy, systems using only free market economy have failed miserably.
    Therefore, central planning is needed to set standards and regulations
    where within the free market actors can act. This is why Americans pay both
    state and federal taxes.

  • Morgan Freeman:

    Love it but kinda biased because it is run by the Koch Brothers

  • MrGuvnah:

    “None, it was screwed in a priori!” :D 

  • NihilisticIdealist:

    I’ve heard quite the opposite of The Lego Movie. Some people have claimed
    that the movie was a stab at capitalism. That it has pro-Marxist
    undertones. Stating the film portrays the working class, Proletariat
    rebelling against their industrial overlords. Even Michael Moore praised it
    for its supposed anti-capitalism themes. Even one of the film’s good guys
    is Abraham Lincoln, Classical Liberals/Libertarians hate Lincoln. 

  • Felicia Cravens:

    #FRN is excited for the new Econ Pop – *’Economics of the LEGO Movie’*
    via +EconStories

    EconPop – The Economics of The LEGO Movie

  • Noontime Spender:

    How many Austrian economists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? You can
    not make quantitative predictions.

  • freesk8:

    This video is awesome! Everything is cool when you’re in a free market!

  • Evan Kant:

    The course down the road of tremendous intellectual oversimplification
    goes strong as far as EconStories is concernrd.
    In the absence of the last financial meltdown someone could be fooled
    so as to actually take you seriously, however, experience should have
    taught you how fragile our understanding of the nature of economics is. The
    free market, as any other human mental construction, is ripe with
    contradictions that we sooner or later face. In view of this fundamental
    principle the annoying, even childish, persistence of yours to present your
    ideological standpoint as a panacea, both obscures the complexity of the
    problems that lie ahead and propagates a counterproductive dichotomy in
    public dialogue.
    A question that could be posed is does Supply and Demand function, in
    the manner it does on Main Street, when we engage Wall Street in our
    dialogue?
    

  • Dustin Lee:

    EconPop – The Economics of The LEGO Movie

  • Joe Parker:

    Well, yeah, I suppose public expenditure is like a gift voucher for a store
    you never shop at.

    …If you could vote for the shopkeeper, and the shop’s product isn’t
    healthcare, education, defence, international law and trade negotiations,
    or environmental or social protection.

    For a website puporting to present complex economic ideas in a balanced way
    this is a remarkably disingenuous take on taxation’s rationale, purpose and
    control.

  • Bunny Evans:

    EconPop – The Economics of The LEGO Movie

    #economics is scary!

  • Jimmy Durette:

    EconPop – The Economics of The LEGO Movie
    #EconPop #legomovie #lego #economics #centralplanning #freemarket
    #communism #emergentorder
    EconPop – The Economics of The LEGO Movie

  • Dustin Le:

    I didn’t understand a SINGLE thing you said LOL

  • kalimdorman:

    Next: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic :) 

  • Bernardo Reyes:

    Economic deconstruction of the Lego Movie from an Austrian School
    perspective.

  • Glenn Slaven:

    EconPop – The Economics of The LEGO Movie

  • swooper74:

    I really enjoy these videos, please do keep making them. My two problems
    with this video, and libertarian economics in general:

    1. It takes a single extreme case as representative of the whole in order
    to paint all government functions in the worst possible light without
    actually linking the two things in anything more than a vague resemblance
    equating fascism/communism with paying the taxes that keep infrastructure
    society needs running. Calling it a gift card to a store you don’t like is
    a narrow, short-sighted view of what taxation really does, as much as it
    sucks to not be a free-rider sometimes.

    2. It completely sidesteps any evidence-based argument to prove the
    existence of an Invisible Hand by calling it “emergent order” and
    (ironically) hand-waving any potential objections aside. You might as well
    call it “Intelligent Design”, or “a wizard did it” for all the actual
    support presented for the idea that is supposed to be the thesis of the
    presentation. If there really is some natural emergent order, where’s the
    empirical data supporting this idea? Isn’t the fact that large crowds are
    so often fallible, and sometimes catastrophically so, when it comes to so
    many things?

    If emergent order was actually a thing, or at least a thing that it was
    wise to just let run free on its own, examples of pure democracy wouldn’t
    produce such bad results so often. Think of a committee meeting you’ve sat
    in where there was no leadership, agenda, or agreed upon purpose for the
    meeting. It wasn’t a meeting at all, was it? No, it was at best a diverting
    waste of time in a boring day, and at worst, some jackass hijacked things
    and pushed loud and long for some monumentally bad idea that nobody else
    cared enough to prevent.

    Some order is a good thing and having someone at least nominally in charge
    and responsible for things can produce much better results than letting
    things spin out as they may.Throwing out the proven track record of limited
    control as identical with a command economy is an absurd
    mischaracterization. Yes, there are problems and abuses within governments,
    but these things are also in corporations, citizens’ organizations, and any
    other place you find people gathering in groups.

    Highly entertaining, but intellectually bankrupt.

  • Kizone Kaprow:

    America’s anarcho-libertarians are so desperate for attention and
    credibility that they see “libertarianism” under every rock. “The
    Incredibles” (according to anarcho-libertarians) is a “libertarian” film.
    So is “Starship Troopers,” “Bananas,” “Breaker Morant” and “The Godfather.”
    Sheesh. No wonder nobody takes libertarians seriously.

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