The chapter contains the book's most systematic political argument, and it is built as a list of four policies each of which is said to produce the opposite of its intention.
The more taboos there are in the world, the poorer the people. The more sharp instruments the people have, the more the state is confused. The more skill and contrivance there are, the more strange things appear. The more laws and orders are displayed, the more thieves and bandits there are.
Each is a claim about a specific instrument of government and each is stated as a correlation rather than as a moral objection. Prohibitions restrict activity and activity is what a population lives on. Effective implements in many hands multiply the ways a situation can go. Ingenuity generates novelty faster than a society can absorb it. And the fourth is the sharpest: publishing the law does not reduce crime but defines and therefore creates it, since an act becomes theft when a rule names it so.
The last of the four is the one that has kept the chapter alive, and it is a genuine argument rather than a paradox, though it is not the only possible account of the correlation it asserts.
The chapter opens with a rule of thumb about domains: govern a state by what is straight, use arms by what is crooked, take the world by not meddling. Straightforwardness for administration, deception for war, and neither for the largest scale. It concedes that a general may need to mislead, and denies that the same skill is transferable upward.