The chapter is built as a single chain in which each term becomes the subject of the next, and it is the most tightly linked argument in the book.
In governing people and serving heaven nothing is like frugality. Frugality means submitting early. Submitting early means piling up power. Piling up power means there is nothing that cannot be overcome. When there is nothing that cannot be overcome, nobody knows the limit. When nobody knows the limit, one may possess the state. And possessing the mother of the state, one may last a long time.
Seven steps from a household virtue to the endurance of a dynasty. The form is unusual here and is more characteristic of the argumentative writing of the period than of this book, which normally states patterns rather than deriving them.
The key term is the first one. The word rendered frugality means sparing use, husbanding a resource rather than doing without it, and it is the same value chapter sixty-seven lists as the second of the three treasures. It is not asceticism. It is the practice of not spending what does not need spending, applied here to the resources of a ruler, which include his authority, his interventions and his people's labour.
The chapter closes on an agricultural image that fixes the whole. This is called deep roots and a firm base, the way of long life and enduring vision. What is being described throughout is not a strategy for growth but a strategy for not being uprooted.