The Shirky Principle: Institutions Try to Preserve the Problem to Which They Are the Solution.
Examples: Tax preparers that lobby against laws to simplify tax filing, private prisons that lobby to support increased incarceration, a bus company suing a carpooling service, an employee resisting attempts to automate their work.
Also, British colonial officials in India set a bounty on dead cobras to reduce their population, only to find that people were breeding cobras to collect the bounty. In 1902, in Vietnam, French colonial rulers set a bounty on rat tails—figuring people would kill the rats to cut off their tails. Instead, people captured rats, cut off their tails, and set the rats free to breed more rats. Later officials found that people were raising rats to collect the bounty.
I thought I had invented the Shirky principle because I couldn’t remember hearing or reading about it anywhere else.