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The Economic Lesson in Ghostbusters Everyone Missed

www.aier.org The Economic Lesson in Ghostbusters Everyone Missed

"The meddling bureaucrat is given one last chance to avoid causing a catastrophe when the utility man tells him maybe they should listen to the people who, you know, actually designed the system." ~Jon Miltimore

The Economic Lesson in Ghostbusters Everyone Missed

Ghostbusters and the Use of Knowledge in Society

The utility man does as he’s told—and of course all hell breaks loose. But notice who actually made the decision. 

It wasn’t the scientists who built the ghost storage facility. It wasn’t the utility worker, who at least had some knowledge of power systems. It was the government bureaucrat who knew absolutely nothing about the system. 

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  • Well, yeah.

    It's a Reagan era movie.

    Of course they'll use the fallacy that only private industry can deal with an issue that was created specifically for the point of the movie.

    If they chose something that was real, they'd find out that private industry is only effective when they have a public industry forcing them to compete on efficiency, rather than just fleecing the market.