Very little in this book names an institution. It works with images, patterns and general terms, and where it criticises a practice it usually describes the behaviour rather than the mechanism. This chapter is the exception: it names the grain tax.
The phrase concerns the levy taken by those above, and the picture is the ordinary one of a rural economy in which the state's revenue is a share of the harvest. What the chapter says is that the share is too large and that the resulting hunger is not a misfortune but a transfer with a visible destination.
That directness places the chapter with a small group of passages where the book comes closest to social protest. Chapter fifty-three sets the immaculate court against the weed-choked fields and the empty granaries and calls the result the boastfulness of robbery. Chapter forty-six measures a government by whether its horses are hauling dung or being bred for war on the frontier. Chapter seventy-two forbids narrowing the places where people live and pressing on how they make their living.
Read together these chapters describe an economy of extraction and say so without metaphor, which is not what the book is generally remembered for.
They also complicate the common description of the text as quietist. A book that tells a sovereign his people starve because he takes too much grain is making a demand, and the demand is not that anybody withdraw from the world. Chapter fifty-seven's sage does nothing and the people transform themselves, and this chapter is what doing nothing would cost the treasury.