Gresham's Law strikes me as far more than just about money. Mencken gives a pretty good expansion of it in his 1926 essay "Bayard vs. Lionheart", which is famous for its closing paragraph about an idiot being elected president, but in its development of why that dynamic comes into being reveals a critical truth about the interaction of complexity at population levels.
I'm still working on a fully generalised expression of Gresham's Law, but the basic form is that it operates as a complexity constraint based on the realised returns on complexity within a given market, or the differential across multiple markets.
"Bad money drives out good" is the mechanism that if, in a single market, coin of high specie content and low specie content circulate together and at the same face value, then the high-grade coin will be preferentially withheld from circulation due to its greater intrinsic value. If there's not sufficient coin for all commerce, this need not be all the high-grade coin, but it tends that way.
In multiple markets, if there is a foreign demand for the specie itself, the good coin will seek that (higher) foreign compensation and actually depart the country of issue.
In politics, as Mencken expands the idea, the problem is that within a majority system, the winner of a popular contest will be the candidate who appeals to a majority of voters. A sophisticated candidate who cannot be understood by the common voter is at a marked disadvantage.
In manufacturing and entertainment, assuming a mass market and either winner-take-all or economies-of-scale dynamics, again, you'll find that the offering which is simple enough to be accepted and understood by more (perhaps with a boost from advertising) will do so. There are other dynamics, including the "Market for Lemons" (Ackerlof) which can enter into that -- Mencken pressages that with his mention of David Harum in his essay -- Harum is the title character and horse-trader of a novel and film of the same name, from which the concept "horse trading" entered the vocabulary. (In a pre-industrial time, "horse trader" occupied very nearly the same occupational niche as "used-car salesman", for much the same reasons.)
And, again to government, given multiple jurisdictions, and a potential range of laws graded by strictness, so long as the individual is free to choose the relevant jurisdiction, then a race-to-the-bottom dynamic results where the least-strict regulatory environment dominates, absent any corrective influence. This noted in divorce laws (Nevada, later Alabama, ultimately no-fault in most states), environmental and labour regulations, company incorporation, and international ship registries ("flags of convenience") being typical examples.
(Also thanks for the spelling fix on Mencken. I always forget the 'c'.)
