Time to die!
Activate the laser!
It's not...it's not doing anything.
My back feels kind of warm, but to be honest that's kind of a pleasant sensation.
Darn it!
Send in the Secretary of the Department of Lasers!
Hello. I have glasses.
Why isn't the laser working?
I don't know. It's my first day.
Send in the Undersecretary of the Department of Lasers.
I'm the Undersecretary of the Department of Lasers.
We haven't received our paychecks in two weeks.
You'll all get your paychecks!
(mom's voice from downstairs) Andy! It's time for dinner. What are you doing up there?
Mom, I'm playing bureaucracy.
Hello , I'm Andrew Heaton and 
you're watching EconPop, the show that sifts
through the haystack of popular culture to find
the needle of economics within... And then
stabs you with it!
About eighty percent of why I plan to have
children is so that I have an excuse to find
all my old LEGOs in mom and dad's house. (The
other twenty percent is for love, tax exemptions,
and spare kidneys.) Recently LEGO extended
beyond making castles and spaceships to an
actual feature length motion picture. An excellent
film which I fully intend to force my future
children to watch.
The villain of the film is "President Business,"
and his alter ego "Lord Business", played
by Will Ferrell. Now, the Mitt Romney haircut
and name “Lord Business” might make you
infer that this is a screed against commerce.
Which would be an interesting theory, but clearly
the LEGO Movie is actually a two-hour long commercial for children’s toys with constant product
placement and branding that’s already grossed
several million dollars.
Moreover, President Business doesn't JUST
run a corporation, he also controls the police
and government, and “voting machines.”
He’s not a businessman, he’s a dictator,
who wants to control the lives of everyone
in Legoland. This is the big theme of the
movie: Centralized planning vs. emergent order.
People everywhere are always messing with my stuff.
But I have a way to fix that.
A way to keep things exactly the way they are supposed to be.
Permanently. 
Centralized planning is where a person or
a group of experts takes charge of a complex
system or society as a whole, like Will Ferrell's
character in the movie. In real life we rarely
employ Will Ferrell to personally organize
things like bus routes or educational standards--central
planning like that falls to politicians and
bureaucrats. A popular term which has recently
entered the national discourse is "technocrat."
Technocrats are just bureaucrats with hipper
glasses.
Whatever their title, the idea is that experts
should organize and run things rather than
leave them to the people at large. Letting
smart people control fields they're smart
at SOUNDS like a smart idea--particularly
if they are wearing  hip glasses. But clearly it can
go off the rails.
Good morning, apartment.
Good morning, doorway.
Good morning, wall.
Good morning ceiling
Good morning, floor.
Ready to start the day.
Ah, here it is.
The instructions to fit in, have everybody like you, and always be happy.
On the 
extreme end of the central planning spectrum
you have Octan in Legoland, or in real life,
command economies like fascist and communist
regimes. The communist Soviet Union, or USSR,
was the biggest, most expansive experiment
in human history in terms of putting experts
in charge of stuff. It failed horribly. It
turns out that the world is too complicated
and too chaotic for guys in lab coats or neckties
to manage from the top down. In the process
of trying to, they ruined their economy, killed
millions of people, and never got around to
making "sophisticated interlocking plastic
blocks" to play with.
The competing (and ultimately triumphant)
system in the LEGO Movie is emergent order.
This is the idea that large groups of people
can, without direction from the bureaucrats
on high, build houses, invent gadgets, and
navigate their cars on the highway pretty well.
All of you have the ability inside of you to be a ground breaker. And I mean LITERALLY! Break the ground!
Peel off the pieces. Tear apart your walls. Build things only you can build. 
Defend yourselves. We need to fight back against President Business's plans to freeze us.
In fact what appears to be a chaotic swarm of
individuals all doing their own thing works
more like an accidental orchestra assembling
itself without a conductor.
A simple example is how much things cost.
It's $37. Wahaha. Awesome!
In the Soviet Union guys with calculators
and clipboards would try to figure out the
ideal price of a pair of shoes. Sometimes
they would make the price too high, and no
one could afford them. Often they would make
the price too low, and the first people to
the store would buy all of the shoes, leaving
the rest to go barefoot. Generally, somebody
would screw up and they would make half as
many left shoes as right shoes. Or too many
shoes but not enough bricks. Or accidentally
make "brick shoes." Setting the right price
became so difficult in the USSR, that desperate
Soviet bureaucrats even tried to copy the
prices in Sears catalogs from the United States,
but to no avail, and the whole system collapsed
in the late 1980s.
Conversely, in the marketplace, nobody has
to set the price for all shoes. People in the
market determine the price for shoes through
the bidding process of supply and demand,
with competing stores, regional variations,
different brands and more, all driven ultimately
by consumer preferences and needs. This market
process, and example of what economists call
"emergent order", accomplishes this spontaneously,
without direction, and for countless transactions
every day. It's not just good at setting the
price of shoes, but also how many shoes to
make. If more people enjoy cowboy boots, like
me, then demand will drive up the price, and
the profits per boot, leading cobblers to
start producing more. If they fall out of
fashion, like me, sales will fall and they'll
make other types of footwear. No central body
ever has to try to set a shoe quota, or universal
boot prices. They emerge.
In the United States we've never experienced
a full-throttle command economy like President
Business in the LEGO movie or the USSR. But
we still have a lot of debatable elements
of centralized planning in our economy, from
food and finance, to energy and education,
to housing and healthcare.
Think about how taxes work: you send your
money to Washington, DC. Eggheads in Washington
decide how to best spend that money, consulting
various and sundry lobbyists along the way,
and then send it in smaller portions to other
people, along with instructions. If you've
ever received a gift card for a birthday present
to a store you don't like, THAT's pretty much
how taxes work--except that they're not a
gift.
In the LEGO movie there were lots of different
types of people, in very different circumstances.
Presumably the people who live in Middle Zealand
understand castle safety regulations better
than someone who lives in a big tower a million
miles away, and people in The Old West have
a better idea of what saloon zoning laws work
for them as well. That kind of local knowledge
is something central planners have never been able
to master.
Emergent order is ultimately the idea that
complex coordination and harmony can evolve
from the bottom up through the actions of
individuals without one master designer telling
everyone what to do. Emergent Order is a vast,
unconscious force like Gravity, or Chuck Norris,
which will generally aggregate information
better than some guy from Harvard. 
Even human
language itself is an emergent order. I’m
not speaking to you in Esperanto for a reason.
Now it's time for everyone's favorite
part of the show, subjective value, where
we invite famous economists to weigh in with
their thoughts.
Today we have mast market calculator, Ludwig von Mises.
What a crowd. What  crowd. Man, I tell you folks Austrians are crazy. 
Why did the Austrian rearrange his spice rack?
'Thyme' preference.
You know the optimist he thinks the glass is half full.
The pessimist, he thinks its half empty.
The Austrian, he thinks capital was mal-invested in oversized glassware.
You know folks, Austrian economists...they never die.
They are just dragged kicking and screaming into equilibrium.
Now, take my friend, Hayek. Please!
No, folks just..just kidding.
Hayek, you know what his favorite Bruce Springstein song is?
Pink Catallactics.
How many Austrian economists does it take to screen in a light bulb?
None. It was screwed in apriori.
Thanks, folks. I'll be here all week.
Five stars.
Well that’s our show, thanks for watching.
Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel.
And if you’re looking for more on the economics
of central planning vs emergent order and
the LEGO Movie, you can download the EconPop
podcast with economist Steve Horwitz, professor
of literature Paul Cantor, and myself. Available
on iTunes.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go play with some LEGOs.
