Tao Te Ching Chapter 57: Ruling by Simplicity

Govern the state with uprightness; deploy the military with surprise tactics; but win the world by taking no deliberate action. Ordinary tools have ordinary uses — yet the largest prize yields only to non-contrivance. The chapter proves it by counting the costs of control, in lines that read like a modern policy audit: the more prohibitions, the poorer the people; the more weapons, the more troubled the state; the more clever schemes, the more strange things appear; the more laws are proclaimed, the more thieves and robbers there are. Each instrument of order manufactures the disorder that justifies more of it.

Then the sage's four-fold alternative, one of the book's great codas: I act without acting, and the people transform themselves; I love stillness, and the people right themselves; I take no deliberate action, and the people prosper; I have no desires, and the people return to simplicity. Rulers shape people not by their programs but by what they are — and a quiet, desireless centre, the chapter wagers, orders more than any legislation can.