VOLUME V, PART FOUR
Law and Scarcity, from One Nation to Many
The first three parts said what the law is, how it runs, and how it treats an ordinary person, and each of them kept touching one line, that the real position of the law is rooted in output falling short. This part, three chapters and nine layers, follows that root all the way down, to the bottom, and asks the most fundamental question of all. Why does law exist at all. Dig to the bottom and the answer surfaces. The law is not a justice that fell from the sky. It is a tool that grew up out of the ground.
The part sets its root proposition first. Ask one thing, if resources were endless, would we still need law, and the answer is no. The precondition of the law is that resources are limited, will not stretch to everyone, and that some want to take more. Follow that question down and seven layers stack up. Output falling short brings scarcity, scarcity brings struggle, struggle needs rules, the one who sets the rules is the strong, and the strong secure their own share first, so that at the root the law is a tool made under scarce output, by the strong, to hold the scarce thing alone and to check the grabbing of the weak. Han Fei saw to the bottom of it more than two thousand years ago in four words, when goods are few, men fight. Huang Zongxi caught the middle of it more than three hundred years ago, the law of one household is not the law of all under heaven.
With the root proposition set, the part opens scarcity itself and finds it is not one thing but four, material, position, relationship, and culture, each one more hidden than the last. Material scarcity is the most solid and the law over it the most plain-spoken. Positional scarcity runs deeper, framed by tools like the imperial examinations. Relational scarcity runs deeper still, and most people live inside the rules of marriage without ever noticing them. Cultural scarcity is the most abstract and the most stubborn, and once a group holds it alone it can carry on for centuries. The more abstract the scarcity, the finer the robe the law wears over it, and the harder the holding is to see through. Then it walks the most solid one, land, across three thousand years, from the well-field system to the merging of the head tax into the land tax in China, from the Twelve Tables to the enclosures in the West. The strong wore out one name after another. The holding alone never changed. Wang Mang, and the Gracchi brothers, gave their lives trying to change it.
Chapter Ten walks on toward the abstract. It opens the three scarcities of the examinations, marriage, and learning, then turns around and stands on the side of the weak to look at the three roads under his feet, to accept, to resist, to step outside, three positions with no higher or lower, all of them tradeable, none of them able to move the great frame of output falling short. Last it looks at a group standing inside the frame who want to change the law, the reformers, Shang Yang whose law lived on after he died, Wang Anshi whose law was scrapped while he still lived, Zhang Juzheng whose law died with him, three fates on one line, the reformer being himself one of the strong, and the strong still writing the law after the reform, only a different set of them. A dead knot shows here in plain view. Move nothing in output and the scarcity stays, and however the weak walk and however the reformer reforms, there is no way out.
Chapter Eleven carries that line from the ancient into the present. It looks first at four tools in America, the patent, the credential, real estate, the political contribution. Then at four tools in China, the household registration, the school district, the establishment post, the inside of the system. Two great civilizations, using entirely different tools, doing one and the same thing. The more developed the place, the handsomer the tools, and the root of the holding alone not one word different. At the end of the chapter the lens lifts once more, from inside a nation to the space between nations, and asks why there has never been a real law between nations, and answers that there is no highest enforcer, that what is called international law is only the law of one household written by the few strongest, opening the great line of the international for the next part.
This part builds from the twenty-sixth layer, the root proposition, to the thirty-fourth, the lawlessness between nations. It spans the widest and packs the densest history, and its root is one line, output falls short, scarcity stays, the strong write law to hold it alone. It keeps one discipline in particular, of America it does not smear, of China it does not boast, it sets down only facts and positions. See these nine layers and a reader will look at today's home prices, school districts, civil-service exams, patents, and household registrations with different eyes. They are all new branches grown off the one long line of scarcity.
Contents
Chapter Nine. Law and Scarcity, the Longest Line of All, Land.
Chapter Ten. Scarcity in the Abstract, the Roads of the Weak, the Limit of Reform.
Chapter Eleven. The Struggle over Scarcity, from Inside a Nation to Between Nations.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.