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The way this question was phrased made me think of res ipsa loquitur, which means "The thing speaks for itself". The common case to teach it in torts classes is an old English case called Byrne v. Boadle. In it, a flour barrel somehow fell out of a window, rolled down the street, and hit Byrne. We have no idea HOW Boadle was so negligent that a flour barrel fell out of a window, but the flour barrel rolling down the street clearly proves that they did something really careless.

Legalism in China was the philosophy that if laws regulate every aspect of life and are strictly enforced for everyone equally, including local rulers, the state will function and justice will prevail, even if the local rulers are corrupt or incompetent.
This lead to harsh punishments for breaking the letter of the law, regardless of intent or circumstances, even if what the law demanded was impossible to do.
So a ruler could be sentenced to death for a failure that was outside of his control, and have no other alternative than to rebel against the emperor, even if he was actually loyal to him.

The wiki article on perverse incentives has a whole catalog, but the most famous (though perhaps apocryphal) is the “cobra effect”: the British in colonial India supposedly put a bounty on cobras, which led to an increase in the cobra population when people started farming them to collect more rewards.