The People Starve Because Rulers Tax Too Much
Laozi traces three separate social ills straight back to rulers who take too much, govern too actively, and cling too hard to their own lives.
Laozi states each diagnosis in parallel: the people starve because those above eat up too much in taxes; the people are difficult to govern because those above are too fond of intervention; and the people take death lightly because those above make too much of their own lives. The structure is unusual for the Tao Te Ching in being this directly diagnostic and economic — it reads less like meditation and more like a political indictment, holding rulers' consumption and interference directly responsible for the population's suffering. Its closing line reverses ordinary expectation: those who do not act for the sake of prolonging their own life are, Laozi says, wiser than those who prize life too highly — the very attachment to self-preservation and accumulation that drives excessive rule is what undermines it.
The people starve because those above eat up too much in taxes.
Tao Te Ching
Written about in
- What Taoism says about leading others
Here the text stops being gentle. People starve because those above eat up too much in taxes; people are hard to govern because those above are too fond of intervention. The disorder a leader complains about is diagnosed as the leader's own appetite.