VOLUME V, CHAPTER 5, SECTION 2
Vested Interests, the Law's Largest Customer
The previous section discussed where the lawmaker comes from and how the people check him. But standing at the scene where law actually operates is a group of people even more lasting than the lawmaker himself, those with a vested interest. The sections before this, legislating, public legal education, lawyers, the lawmaker, are all the visible face of the legal system, and yet inside every single one of them stands someone who profits from it. This section takes up vested interests, a position this book already set down back in Volume IV, who is truly law's largest customer.
One. A Vested Interest Is Not Some Bad Person, It Is Everyone Who Profits Inside the Legal System
Inside the legislature sit representatives of interest groups. Inside the judicial system, lawyers, judges, and court staff make their living from law. Prisons, police, and security personnel are also vested interests inside the legal system. Add them all up, and they share one trait, they stay at the scene of the law full time, while an ordinary citizen only shows up now and then.
This one fact quietly decides who law's true customer is. A shop's daily regular and a passerby who wanders in once a year, it is not hard to guess which one the shopkeeper pays more attention to. Law is exactly the same kind of shop, and it is obvious which group the whole machine bends closer to, the ones stationed daily at the scenes of legislating, enforcing, and judging, or the ordinary person who may enter a courthouse only a handful of times in an entire life.
Note that the vested interests spoken of here are, for the most part, not bad people. A clerk who makes his living processing cases, a lawyer who reviews contracts for a company, a guard who watches over a prison, each is simply living his own life. But put together, they form a net stationed at the scene every single day, while the ordinary person is only an occasional catch that net pulls up and puts back down.
Two. A Line from Laozi Points to the True Face of Vested Interest
Around 500 BC, Laozi's line, quoted earlier.
It takes from what has too little to serve what has too much. Laozi, Daodejing, Chapter 77.
Taking from those who lack to serve those who have too much already is man's way. A vested interest, put plainly, is exactly this group who already has plenty. They have already secured enough resources, and what they want most is to keep holding what they have secured. To them, law is a tool for keeping the present arrangement in place, and they will use every means available to make law hold that arrangement steady on their behalf.
This also clears up a common illusion. People often assume those with the most money and power want most to change the law. In fact the reverse is true, the ones who most want law to stay put are exactly this group, because the present arrangement already favors them. Those who truly hope for law to change are usually the ones being pressed down by the present arrangement, and it is exactly this group that has the least strength to change anything.
Three. The Vested Interests That Matter Most Come Down to Three Kinds
Broadly speaking, anyone who gains something inside the existing legal system counts as a vested interest. But measured by actual influence, three kinds matter most. The first, people inside the legislative and enforcement institutions, who directly make and carry out law, holding the most direct influence over it. The second, legal professionals, lawyers, judges, and law professors, who interpret law with professional authority, giving their words weight. The third, those who have gained enormous wealth or power under law's protection, who hold the resources to influence legislation, and whose stake in the outcome is largest of all.
The interests of these three groups all point in the same direction, keeping the present arrangement in place. And what is remarkable is that they need no conspiracy among themselves to automatically converge into a single force sustaining that arrangement. Each is simply acting in his own interest, and together, the whole structure is held steady. This is exactly what makes it so hard to fight, there is no single mastermind to hold accountable, because there is no mastermind at all, only countless people each running his own private calculation, whose calculations happen to land in the same place.
Four. What Each of These Three Groups Is Actually Maintaining
People inside the legislative and enforcement institutions are maintaining their own position and expanding their own power. The more complicated law becomes, the wider the room for discretion in enforcing it, and the wider that room, the greater the power, so they have every incentive to let law grow ever more complicated. A simple law leaves little room for the one enforcing it. A complicated law can be read almost any way, and that room to read it however one likes is itself power. This layer is the hardest to notice, because it never has to be written into any clause, it hides entirely inside the space of interpretation, and the more complicated the law, the wider that space grows.
Legal professionals maintaining complexity was already covered thoroughly in the previous chapter's discussion of lawyers, and needs only one line here, the harder law is to understand, the more indispensable these professionals become, and simplifying law would be close to a death blow for this entire trade, so the whole trade is naturally inclined against making law simple.
Wealthy and powerful figures who benefit under law's protection are maintaining their own wealth and power. Law protects their property, their contracts, their inheritance, while at the same time restraining ordinary people. Law lets some people legally monopolize, legally suppress wages, legally sidestep taxation, and all of this is exactly what law serving those who already have plenty looks like. They influence legislation through lobbying, donations, and shaping public opinion, all toward a single goal, keeping law speaking on their behalf. The daily work of these three groups is, in effect, maintaining the structure of vested interest. They may not be bad people, and may even genuinely believe they are doing the right thing, but the position they stand on decides that they will automatically maintain the present arrangement.
Five. How Great Their Power Actually Is Becomes Clear the Moment You Look at Where a Law Is Drafted
When a new law is being drafted, representatives of every kind of interest group surround the lawmaker, talking. Business associations, bar associations, judges' associations, real estate associations, all keep dedicated lobbyists, legal advisers, and ample budgets, lobbying on a regular schedule. Where is the ordinary person. In the factory, in the field, in the office, with no time to attend a legislative hearing. The rare one who does show up arrives with no organization and no fluency in that professional language, and his voice is quickly drowned beneath a wave of professional representation. No one is deliberately shoving the ordinary person out the door, it is only that admission to this game is built from time, organization, and expertise, and an ordinary person simply cannot afford that price of entry.
So the outcome of legislating is nearly guaranteed in advance, law tends to favor those with a vested interest. Corporate law, tax law, labor law, exactly the areas most directly tied to vested interest, are exactly where these groups are most active, while the laws meant to protect ordinary people and the weak are, in the drafting, often weakened, compromised, or shelved. None of this requires anyone to intend harm, it is simply that the louder side wins, nothing more.
One old saying fits this layer especially well, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. But at the scene where law is drafted, the ones squeaking, squeaking loudly, squeaking at the door every single day, are exactly these few kinds of vested interest, and the ordinary person can barely get through the door to squeak at all. There is only so much grease, and whoever is present, whoever squeaks loudest, gets it.
Six. A Line from Sima Qian Lays the Motive Behind All This Flat on the Table
Around 100 BC, Sima Qian wrote, in the Biographies of the Money-Makers in the Records of the Grand Historian.
The whole world bustles, all of it coming for profit. The whole world hustles, all of it going for profit. Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian, Biographies of the Money-Makers.
People come and go across the world, bustling and hustling, all of it for profit. Sima Qian passes no verdict on whether this is right or wrong, he simply lays this plain fact of human nature on the table. Chasing profit is ordinary human nature. But once a vested interest uses law to maintain and expand its own profit, law's neutrality is quietly broken.
This maintaining force generates itself automatically, with no one needing to plot it behind the scenes. A lawyer earning income from law's complexity will automatically maintain that complexity. An enforcer living off power will automatically let the clauses grow denser. A wealthy merchant whose fortune is protected by law will automatically work to influence legislation. What makes it worse is that this structure reinforces itself. The more complicated law becomes, the less an ordinary person can afford to use it, and the less he can afford to use it, the more he must depend on those with a vested interest. An ordinary person facing a lawsuit has to hire a lawyer, the lawyer earns money and grows more motivated to maintain the complexity, and round and round it goes, the structure tightening a little more with every turn. This is exactly why, once a system takes shape, it becomes so extraordinarily hard to move, not because the people maintaining it are bad, but because the present arrangement favors them.
Seven. This Is the Deepest and Hardest to See Through Layer of Vested Interest
It is not open, declared oppression, it is a structural tilt. A vested interest does not need to do anything wrong at all, it only needs to do its own job well and hold onto its own interest, and law tilts automatically toward it. This kind of tilt carries more force than any single deliberate wrongdoing, because it is invisible and automatic, hidden beneath the appearance of everyone simply working normally, and very hard to point a finger at.
The remedies offered in earlier sections, public legal education, hiring a lawyer, voting, checks and balances, all look capable of countering it, and yet every single one carries a hidden precondition, an ordinary person must have enough resources and enough strength to use it. And what an ordinary person lacks is exactly that. Public legal education requires time to learn, and an ordinary person is scrambling to survive. Hiring a lawyer requires money, and an ordinary person without money has no choice but to give up. Oversight and speaking out require a platform, and an ordinary person has no media, no organization. So these safeguards that appear to belong to everyone end up, in the end, mostly usable only by those who already have plenty, and the cycle reinforces itself from there. So the truly hard part was never identifying some one bad person, it is seeing clearly this net that has no bad person in it at all, a net with no mastermind, and yet harder to dismantle than any mastermind could ever be.
Eight. The Position Set by This Section
This section sets the fifteenth layer. Vested interests are law's largest customer. They stay at the scene of the law full time, carrying the loudest voice and the strongest force, so law automatically tends to serve them. This is not any one person's fault, it is structure. As long as a division exists between those who have plenty and those who lack, law will automatically lean toward those who have plenty. Volume IV already set down this layer of vested interest when discussing political institutions, and here, in law, it simply changes venue, its true face unchanged, law becomes the vested interest's first tool for holding its position.
Seeing this layer clearly is not meant to leave a reader in despair over law, it is meant to keep a reader from naively believing law is neutral by nature. Law's neutrality has never held itself in place automatically, it is only barely maintained by force after force pushing back against this tilt. From now on, whenever you look at any law, ask who stood at the scene where it was drafted, whether the ordinary person had a seat there at all, and the answer is very often written into whom that law ended up favoring.
The next section asks what the weak can do, the several forms of self-rescue among ordinary people. Since law automatically tilts toward those who have plenty, those who lack must find another way to live. Carry the position of vested interest with you, and walk into the next section.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Section Three. What the Weak Are to Do. The Several Ways Ordinary People Rescue Themselves.