View from the North 40: When the law enforces economics terms

The law of diminishing returns says that if all the factors in a process remain the same, except one, and that one is steadily increased, eventually a tipping point will be reached and everything will start failing, lose its luster, fall to wreck and ruin. You get what I’m saying.

As an example, let’s say your favorite full meal includes ice cream for dessert. One day you have your favorite meal with ice cream, but you just keep eating more and more ice cream.

Eventually, you will get sick of that ice cream, and then you will get sick from that ice cream. It’s likely, then, that at least for a while, this will no longer be your favorite meal with dessert. But, if you do keep going back and eating like this, then you develop diabetes and it proves the theory in another way.

You see how this goes? It’s actually an economics term that is considered what you might call a natural law. But when it’s applied in the real world it seems to be enforceable as an actual law.

Kathy Hill, a California woman who recently moved to Holly Hill, Florida, loves the phrase “Bah, Humbug,” which is associated with Ebenezer Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol.” Hill loved the saying because she associated it with the lesson Scrooge learns about the true meaning of Christmas, The Daytona Beach News-Journal reported Dec. 4 says.

She also loved it so much she bought Christmas lights to spell out the saying and hung that off the balcony of her beach-front apartment balcony.

She said she “thought it was comical, different.”

Hill is so naive, or an evil wrong-doer who must be punished. You pick.

Her neighbors complained to the condo’s community association, and the owner of the building got involved, and everyone demanded Hill take the lights down.

The apartment unit owner Laurie Borasky-Gigliotti told her to take down the display “because other residents were coming unglued,” the News-Journal said. She said balcony lights are against the rules — “let alone Bah Humbug” — and warned Hill to prepare for “major, massive retaliation.”

What?

Now Hill is very sad and any further violations of the law of diminishing returns will be punishable by fines and, presumably, visitation by three angels.

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While most of us have fond memories of watching at least one of the Disney movies, David Berry Jr. of Springfield, Missouri, will be getting his fill of at least one of the Disney classics, “Bambi.”

Berry, who is now a resident of the Lawrence County Jail, was convicted in a multi-year poaching case in which hundreds of bucks were killed illegally for sale of their head mounts. Three other members of Berry’s family were also caught and charged and at least 14 other people are or will be facing charges, the Springfield News-Journal says.

David Berry Jr., though, was sentenced this month to one year plus 120 days in jail on a variety of charges by Judge Robert George. The judge also sentenced Berry to mandatory once-a-month viewing of “Bambi.”

So the law of diminishing returns got Berry arrested for poaching, and the law of diminishing returns will either make him hate the movie, or hate hunting — depending on how this Disney-fueled scared-straight project turns out.

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Finally, The Associated Press reported that 23-year-old Anthony Andrew Gallagher of Port St. Lucie, Florida, is demonstrating the law of diminishing returns for us today with a new economic law indicator: marijuana usage.

Seems Gallagher suffered from diminishing judgment when he went to the local McDonald’s for breakfast and tried to pay with a baggy of weed.

Economists frown on the use of trade rather than money. McDonald’s does, too, so the checker turned him down.

Besides McDonald’s breakfasts are good, but no way they’re worth a baggy of weed on the open market.

When Gallagher’s returns and judgment diminished further, he went back for another try at procuring breakfast, but the police were on the scene, and they arrested him on possession and driving under the influence charges.

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I don’t have any experience in drug bartering, but it seems to me that marijuana-for-food swaps would go over better during the late shift. It’s a judgment call at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40.com/.