VOLUME V, CHAPTER 11
The Struggle over Scarcity, from Inside a Nation to Between Nations
The last chapter looked at three kinds of scarcity, the imperial examination, marriage, and learning, at the three roads in front of the weak, and at why reformers never reform all the way, but all of that still sat inside history. This chapter walks in two stages. The first two sections turn the lens on scarcity toward the present, one looking at America and one at China, drawing the long line of the strong legislating to hold scarcity alone inside one nation to a close. The third section lifts the lens higher, crossing from inside one nation to the space between nations, and opens a new line. The chapters before this spoke of the strong and the weak inside one country. From the end of this chapter on, the subject is the taker and the taken between nations.
The first section looks at contemporary America's four tools, the patent, the credential, real estate, and the political contribution. The higher a country's output and the stronger its rule of law, the more refined its tools and the more handsome the packaging. The patent turns knowledge that could be copied without limit into scarcity, so that an Indian generic version of the same drug runs tens of times cheaper than the original. One person who knows how to bake bread teaches another, and nothing at all is taken from the first, and yet patent law makes this kind of knowledge artificially scarce. Elite schools admit three to five percent, and four quiet doors, the children of alumni, major donors, athletic recruiting, and elite private schools, lock position shut. Redlining's legacy still leaves a tenfold wealth gap today, and zoning law, property tax, and credit scoring leave the poor less and less able to afford a home. After a 2010 Supreme Court case, political contributions climbed from a few hundred million to well over ten billion dollars by 2024. An ordinary voter holds only one vote, and that vote carries almost no weight against money. Four tools, more market-based than in ancient times, and the root has not changed by a single word, setting the thirty-second layer.
The second section looks at contemporary China's four tools, household registration, the school district, the establishment post, and the inside of the system. Household registration, established in 1958, splits people into two systems, so a child who moves with migrant parents must return to the home province for the college entrance exam, one line of registration deciding the starting line. The very same score might reach a top university in a large city, and only an ordinary college back in the home province. District housing turns enrollment by proximity into real estate scarcity, with some district apartments running to over a hundred thousand yuan a square meter. Millions sign up for the civil service exam, with only one or two in a hundred admitted, the contemporary imperial examination. Han Fei wrote that the sage weighs how much there is and how thick or thin it runs, and sets policy accordingly, and today's civil service exam is the newest version of exactly that line. The inside of the system holds steady the order of well over a billion people, and it also compresses the space of the individual, and both sides need to be laid out. String the eight tools together, and America runs more through the market, China more through administration, and the root does not differ by a hair, setting the thirty-third layer. At its end this section gathers the whole run on scarcity together and leaves only one line, law is not a justice fallen from the sky, it is a tool grown from the ground.
The third section pulls the lens up to the space between nations. The United Nations Charter was born in 1945, yet no one answered to its face who would enforce it, and a single veto on the Security Council can stall a resolution. Inside a nation, when a person breaks the law, police come to his door. When a nation tears up a treaty, what prison could possibly hold a nation. The League of Nations stood helpless before great-power aggression and dissolved on its own. Huang Zongxi spoke of the law of a single family, not the law of all under heaven, and pushed onto the international stage, it becomes the law legislated by whichever few nations were strongest at the time. "This is the law of a single family, not the law of all under heaven." On the international stage, that single family is no longer one emperor, it is one nation, or a handful of nations, that happened to win. Han Fei spoke of scarcity breeding contest, and with a few words changed, it becomes the international version. "Today people fight over them, not out of baseness, but because goods are scarce." People today fight not because they are baser, but because goods are scarce. Laozi spoke of a hall filled with gold and jade that no one can keep safe, and the Northern Song's Jingkang Incident and the Manchu entry through the pass at the end of the Ming are both footnotes to those eight words. Put the three lines together, and between nations there is no supreme enforcer, setting the thirty-fourth layer.
Three sections, building from the thirty-second layer to the thirty-fourth. The first two together carry the strong legislating to hold scarcity alone from ancient times all the way to today's two great civilizations, America and China, and the third picks up a still larger line, the very same logic scaled up to run between nations. Part Four closes here, and its root is a single line, when output falls short, scarcity is there, and the strong legislate to hold it alone. This chapter holds one discipline with special care, speaking of America without smearing it, of China without boasting of it, and of the international stage without taking sides, only laying out positions and facts, and leaving the judgment to the reader. The next chapter enters Part Five, first looking at how many depths a strong nation's conduct toward a weak one runs to, and the deepest of them is called occupying a position.
Contents
Section One. Present-Day America, Four Tools in the Struggle over Scarce Resources.
Section Two. Present-Day China, Four Tools in the Struggle over Scarce Resources.
Section Three. Between Nations, Why There Is No Law.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Section One. Present-Day America, Four Tools in the Struggle over Scarce Resources.