The political use of this fundamental economic principle is generally incoherent and shameless - especially by the usual suspects. Just the other day for example, the Teleprompted Oracle™ (aka Kamala), averred “it doesn’t work that way” when someone suggested that putting more police on the streets would reduce the runaway crime. Given her demonstrated penchant for throwing money and resources at problems, this is not only incorrect, but inconsistent with her erratic approach to the law of diminishing returns in other fields largely controlled by the reigning, omniscient fedgov.
Several interesting comparisons present themselves. Take public education (yes, please take it…). It is painfully clear - especially to homeowners (in states where property tax finances schools) - that funding of school systems (teachers’ salaries and benefits, especially) has skyrocketed. The results of this largesse are so pervasively and abysmally awful however, that the ‘educators’ (and superabundant administrators) primary answer - after simply ignoring the problem - is to demand that objective tests of student performance be stopped entirely (because, of course, they are ‘racist’). In public schools, ‘merit’ is treated the way four letter word once were.
Now, four letter words are deemed perfectly normal in all settings, so maybe it is inflation that has put forth five letter words as successors. But, recall also, 2 + 2 no longer necessarily equals 4, because that’s ‘racist, too. So, by elimination, the problem must be simply with merit - of either the students or their teachers. Fear not, though: your lying eyes tell you the system’s output consists of illiterate, innumerate, incoherent students, but all the process measures of quality show the system to be humming along, swimmingly. Spreadsheets with no output measurement columns don’t lie. No problem - the MSM says so - it’s only the system is somehow ‘starved for resources’. Since we no longer test for readings, writing or thinking abilities - and the current population’s cumulative cognitive ability has been impaired by ‘education’ for almost three generations - such s small contradiction presents no logical problem to informed progressive voters (domestic or imported).
How about healthcare? Surely, the more you spend the healthier the population becomes, no? No. The US spends 50% more than any other country per capita - $12,000+ per capita vs an average of ~$8000 for comparable nations. By most every measure, we are no better off and clearly worse by some measures. Why might this be?
The short answer is that in countries with more than basic health care, most of one’s health is determined by one’s behavior, by lifestyle choices. There are many, many examples of this but they are beyond the scope here. Suffice it to say, rampant drugs, sex, rock ’n roll behind the wheel of motorcycles or speeding cars don’t make for extended life expectancy, so let’s get back to the big picture of diminishing returns - or ‘too much of a good thing’. Here is a link which clearly shows the US is an outlier, when it comes to results vs. spending.
An even more clear image is seen in the graph below. ATTRIBUTION: What is the law of diminishing returns? | Definition from TechTarget
To flesh out the process, imagine a poor, undeveloped country with minimal resources and no public health system whatsoever. Let’s place it in an equatorial location and assign ourselves the task of improving the country’s health. We want to get the most for our limited money. Should we start building hospitals? No! That would help precious few people. We must rather ask what is taking the greatest toll on life. Over the past century, the biggest killers have been malnutrition and infectious disease. So, begin feeding people nutritious food; use insecticides (and maybe some newer genetic biological tricks) to kill the mosquitos and reduce malaria; treat drinking water to eliminate schistosomiasis. We are on the exponential part of the curve of increasing result for expenditure, as the life expectancy rises rapidly. Put simply, public health measures save far more lives than acute care hospitals. Here, all this is taken for granted, as we demand ‘cures’ for the latest disease which is a direct result of choices we as individuals make in our lives. When large numbers do it, we get things like the ‘opioid crisis’ or the ‘epidemic of obesity’, which we want a pill or injection to cure for us. In any case, we are beyond the top of the curve, where the slope becomes negative. This is due to the inconvenient fact that every act has numerous consequences and some of them are harmful.
To return to the point I want to make regarding the Oracle™’s assertion that “it doesn’t work that way”. If you were to place law enforcement personnel on the curve of the law of diminishing returns, it is clear (and many studies bear this out) that more cops present in crime-laden areas falls on the steeply ascending portion of the curve. The people who know this best are those living in the affected communities. It’s common sense, which persists despite the state’s (and all other leftist organizations, public and private) effort to excise it. Why then do politicians apply different standards or no standards as the situation requires, to government funded programs?
The answer is not complicated - economic realities are continually suppressed and manipulated so as to enhance or protect the interests of those already in power or to promote the ‘election’ of those favored by the elites and their propaganda arm, the MSM. Those favored by them are most always fellow travelers, to borrow from the (surprisingly!!) recent past. In our post - modern, post - fact, post - cognitive, post - reality political universe, consistency is entirely optional! Principles, themselves, are optional depending on …. who knows? Maybe the day of the week or phase of the moon. If we cannot know what is a woman, what are we permitted to know?
Growing up, I liked and took some comfort in the art of Pieter Bruegel The Elder, who revealed the pleasures of the quotidian. Unfortunately, the image of the workings of today’s society is radically different. Those which immediately come to mind are seen in the works of Hieronymous Bosch - such are the imaginative machinations of those with power to torment us. I invite you to search for links to these painters and look at some. See if you agree. I’m not sure of the rules for copying/pasting paintings.
[Parenthetically] - (Though our times are increasingly lawless in the violent dimensions, we all know that those with my worldview remain subject to the most severe penalties for displays of wrongthink; I would hate to catch the attentions one of these lurking demons so well captured by Bosch, and bring down torments on myself and/or our little community. Such prevalent action, too, I can only hope, will turn out to have diminishing returns for those practitioners of censorship and punishment of views not reflecting the revealed wisdom of our betters).
