L'arc de Triomph, Paris

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So to shield your pride, just say: “€œI was in favor of massive immigration in the past when we needed more immigrants, but now we have enough immigrants, so I”€™m no longer in favor of it. “€œ

Is that so hard to do?

Indeed, genuinely successful policies almost always tend to run into diminishing utility. They deal with the problems they were implemented to deal with, which, if all goes well, leaves them with new problems that are less amenable to the old solutions. For example, the Reagan Administration dealt with the threat of World War III posed by 53,000 Soviet tanks and 45,000 nuclear warheads by encouraging Saudi fundamentalists to go fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. This worked extraordinarily well on the Soviets, but left the U.S. with the subsequent problem of overconfident Sunni mujahideen such as Osama bin Laden.

But that’s about as successful as a policy can be.

In fact, you can often distinguish between policies advanced to solve problems and power ploys pushed for the sake of more power, for that thrill of a boot stamping on a human face, because public-spirited policies inherently suffer from diminishing returns.

In contrast, grabs for power benefit from increasing returns. The more numbers you pile up, the more you can engage in muscle flexing and intimidation. If you are a French politician who, say, wants to select a new people to elect you, the more foreigners you import to vote for you, the politically harder it becomes for your countrymen to challenge your self-fulfilling logic.