Daming Yuanfu

Chapter 1401 The curtain of tax reform kicks off
Jinghua, who manages his family in a highly pragmatic manner, is used to only doing planning by himself, and assigning specific affairs to people. At most, he can call a few people in charge to come over and give them a face-to-face instruction before letting go.Therefore, it is absolutely impossible to expect him to take care of "28 taels of honey" when he is the Minister of the Ministry of household affairs.

The biggest feature of the Hongwu type of finance is that the consumption department directly connects with the taxpayers, and the central financial department, that is, the Ministry of Households, does not have the central control function. What will this lead to?Of course, under this kind of fiscal decentralization, the center has no money.

You see, each consumer department has financial power: the Ministry of War collects military supplies and military service, the Ministry of Industry collects construction supplies and labor, and the palace collects royal expenses and consumption...

what does that mean?It means that whoever is more powerful in these yamen can collect more taxes.So what is the household department doing?The Ministry of Households is in charge of the food and the food tax in the region implemented by a whip law.

然而即便如此，有明一朝的户部尚书也并不好当。据黄仁宇统计，1380年后上任了89位户部尚书，其中25人致仕离职、22人转任他职、16人被解职、7人死在任上、7人因病告退、3人被处死、3人被流放、1人未经允许而离职、1人死在战场上、1人自缢殉国，最后还剩下三位更神奇，堂堂地官大人，史书里居然没有详细资料说明下落。

Gao Yushi is very clear about what this Hongwu-type finance is: Zhu Yuanzhang actually regards such a huge empire as a village that produces and sells itself!
He thought that all he needed to do was reduce the land tax and appease the peasants, and the country could enjoy long-term stability.It's a pity that the reality is very skinny. This kind of self-sufficient financial system of various departments is rigid and inflexible. In the event of an emergency, the people who should collect taxes cannot collect it, and there is only one way left: apportion the burden to the public. People who will not rise up to rebel.

What a mockery!This is almost the opposite of Zhu Yuanzhang's original idea. The person he most wanted to protect became the person who was the most exploited under this system.

So how did the "Hongwu-type finance" evolve to this point?

As we all know, the nominal tax rate of the Ming Dynasty is actually quite low, which has something to do with the poor background of the founding emperor Zhu Yuanzhang.

He looked down on Sang Hongyang, Wang Anshi and others who expanded their fiscal revenues like miraculous skills and obscenities. Instead, he set tax rates for each locality, engraved the tax and food revenues of each province and city on stone slabs, and erected them in the hall of the Ministry of Household Affairs. within.

The meaning couldn't be more clear: I just want to never raise taxes.

However, as Gao Yushi emphasized in "Qiyong Shu" before, the price of low taxation was that the state gave up many government functions. Therefore, the Ming Dynasty could only require the army to farm for self-sufficiency in military supplies, and promote self-government management in villages, etc.

In fact, the "separation and cooperation" between the Production and Construction Corps and the Imperial Guards created by Gao Wu during the restructuring of the Beijing camp is to some extent wiping Zhu Yuanzhang's ass.

However, Zhu Yuanzhang was more than that. The ancestral system he established made the Ming court pay very little salary to officials.Gu Yanwu, who later wrote "Every man is responsible for the rise and fall of the world", lamented the poor treatment of officials in the Ming Dynasty.

How bad is it?Do you think it's just a lack of money?That's more than that. Under the real economy of the Hongwu type of finance, the salaries of officials are not all silver, copper coins and precious banknotes (now they are almost garbage), but are converted into all kinds of strange objects. The more famous ones are pepper, soy Wood and so on were once paid to civil and military officials as wages.

As for cloth and silk, it is more common. Even different cloth, silk, silk, silk, silk, satin, etc. produced in various places can be converted for you and then issued as salary. Unfortunately, the Ministry of Households is in charge of this conversion. ——Your calculation is too high, and the Ministry of Finance is short-lived, and the conversion is too low, and the officials scold you.

If you compare it to future generations, it’s like you work in a government agency. You usually deal with various superior documents and work reports. Hundreds of catties of eggs said that this thing is your salary, how do you feel?
I work in the imperial court, do I have to open a grocery store after returning home to really exchange my wages into money?
So to be honest, under this sand sculpture system, it is very difficult for officials not to be greedy.

But Zhu Yuanzhang is not afraid, he has his solution.

His solution was to use heavy codes.He wrote "A Brief Record of Awakening Corruption", which may be called China's first anti-corruption teaching material. There is a clear regulation here that if you embezzle 60 taels of silver, you will be beheaded for public display, and the skin will be peeled off and stuffed into straw to hang in the government Office as a warning, this is the famous "peeling grass".

As we all know, this bloody suppression failed to stop corruption, because the officials were too poor. For example, when Li Dongyang, the chief minister of the cabinet during the Zhengde period, died, he was so poor that he "couldn't attend a funeral."

In the end, the wool still came from the sheep, and the officials cleverly set up a name to increase their income, and the apportionment of gang silver, office silver, military service, and salary gradually got out of control.Although the nominal tax rate is low, the burden on the people is getting heavier.

The bureaucratic system is blackening rapidly, and finally it has reached the point where no official is corrupt. Anyone who does not integrate into this chain of interests will not be able to gain a foothold in the officialdom.Most of the bureaucrats of the Ming Dynasty who were influenced by Confucian culture chose to give in when they experienced this kind of ideological struggle of "ideal or realistic".

As a result, everyone in the imperial court began to desperately generate income for themselves, but the central finance was poor and empty.It seems that each department performs its own duties, but each sweeps the snow in front of its own house, and finally forms a huge public service vacuum.Social responsibilities such as currency issuance, commercial logistics, household registration statistics, and land surveying are gradually neglected.

The absence of the government gave birth to a considerable degree of grassroots autonomy in the middle and late Ming Dynasty.Don't talk about other places, just talk about Xinzheng, Henan. If the Gao family doesn't nod for something in the local area, can the county lord in Xinzheng continue to handle it?However, Gao's family was still a good official and a good gentry in their hometown. It is almost self-evident what would happen if they were local tyrants and evil gentry.

This state of "civilian anarchy" led to a strange social scene in Ming Dynasty: on the one hand, peasants who had resettled and resettled gave up their household registration and wandered around due to excessive expropriation; on the other hand, urban handicraftsmen spontaneously united to form a The so-called budding of capitalism, Suzhou alone had at least [-] handicraftsmen during the Longqing period.However, due to the rigidity of the fiscal system, the government was unable to collect taxes on industry and commerce until Gao Gong came to power and Gao Pragmatism rose.

The Hongwu-type finance is like the obscene medicine of the Hu monk in "The Golden Lotus". When everyone who is immersed in it becomes a vested interest group, no one cares about the side effects.

Daming's turn from prosperity to decline was first reflected in its financial deficit.As the country's most important tax, land tax has been declining.During the Yongle period, the land tax income remained at about 3000 million shi, and by the first year of Jiajing, this figure had fallen to around 2500 million.In other words, after more than 100 years of development in the Ming Dynasty, the government's most important fiscal revenue has not only not increased, but even decreased by nearly [-]%.

It has only been a few decades since the establishment of the Hong Dynasty in later generations, how many times has the economic scale doubled?Even though the times are different and the speed of development is always different, but comparing the two, how can high pragmatism endure such a system that is not only backward but also wonderful!
Behind this is that while the rich and powerful gentry occupy a large area of ​​land, they give themselves tax cuts and exemptions; ordinary people not only have to pay taxes in full, but also face additional apportionments and corvee.Those who have money do not pay taxes, and those who pay taxes have no money. This kind of strange national conditions has greatly frustrated the tax system, and the country has gradually begun to default on taxes on a large scale.According to Huang Renyu's research, by the time of Chongzhen, more than a quarter of the counties in the entire empire's fiscal and tax areas had not paid any taxes to the central government.

At the same time, fiscal expenditures are increasing day by day. Zhu Yuanzhang stipulated that his sons and grandsons enjoy financial appropriations for generations. This initially inconspicuous expenditure has become a financial maggot in the middle and late Ming Dynasty.According to the report of the Ministry of Rites in the fifth year of Longqing, at that time, "only princes, county kings and generals and lieutenants at all levels had a total of 870 million stones in Lumi", which accounted for about one-third of the country's land tax revenue.

To sum up, the fiscal and taxation system established by Zhu Yuanzhang is not only primitive but also rigid. The superficially low tax rate and low flexibility make the basic fiscal revenue of the government almost fixed.In the event of natural disasters and man-made disasters, when the government needs additional expenditures, it finds that there is no system to collect taxes from those who should pay them. In the end, it can only be apportioned to the common people engaged in agricultural production, resulting in an increasing burden on the people.

Gao Pragmatism has actually solved a small part of these problems step by step over the years.

For example, his early "Shu Yi Lu Shu" made the post station no longer have the power to exploit the local area, but turned it into a "government guest house" responsible for its own profits and losses, from an "organization unit" to a "institution". Officials can't exploit them arbitrarily, and they must issue a "reimbursement bill" for everything used along the way, and they will be reimbursed when they arrive.

Qingzhang's farmland is the second matter, which is also linked to this matter by encouraging the emperor to "sell Huangzhuang", and resell the original large number of Huangzhuang near the capital to the original Huangzhuang tenants as much as possible. The emperor came up with means such as repayment and redemption for up to 30 years.

But Huangzhuang alone is not enough. The high-practical and deceitful Jingzhong nobles joined the Beiyang Maritime Trade Alliance one after another, using the appalling return on investment in the maritime trade business to lure the nobles to invest in maritime trade, and then sold their original unshakable land. , "Traveling lightly" went to the sea to make money.

In fact, this is what Gao Pragmatism did with painstaking efforts to liberate the means of production for ordinary people, so that they can at least have a basic source of income or a basis for survival.But this work is still not finished, at least... there are relatively few nobles in the south who have been stolen by someone from Gao, let alone officials.

Of course, there are many officials who have quietly invested in the Beiyang Maritime Trade Alliance, but Gao Pragmatism has also played a trick here: because these officials dare not buy shares as blatantly as the nobles, they only enjoy the right to share dividends , a series of rights and interests such as the voting rights that its shares should have brought were transferred to Gao Wushi in black and white.

In fact, officials in this era really don't care much about this, or they subconsciously think that they are not as pragmatic as doing business. god of wealth.

The third thing is the division of the Beijing camp. This is not only to solve the problem of the lack of combat effectiveness of the Beijing camp, it is also to solve the financial problem: those who fight the war fight well, those who make money earn money well, and those who make money go to support the war Yes, at the same time, the imperial court lost the big burden of Beijing Camp, which originally required an annual allocation of 10 taels.

However, Gao Yushi knew in his heart that the effectiveness of this system was only limited to when he was still in the court.Once someone Gao Gao leaves the court, no matter whether he resigns or dies, this system will fail at an extremely fast speed: those who make money are absolutely unwilling to support those who fight "for no reason".

He is very pragmatic, and those who make money dare not support those who fight, because the most profitable part of these people is controlled by Jinghua, and controlled by him.If one day he Gao Pragmatic let go of this, these nobles have to find all kinds of excuses to refute this "extra expense"?
You want to say that excuses are hard to come by?Just kidding, it's so easy to find: my Production and Construction Corps is losing money, and I can't afford to support you!
how about it?As long as a fake account is made properly, even the emperor can only stare blankly.

Therefore, Gao Wushi has not finished the reform of the Beijing camp. He still has other big moves. Of course, this has a lot to do with his leaving office too soon. back door.

By the time the "Qiyong Shu" is played, it actually means that the highly pragmatic fiscal reform has entered the deep water area.

Gao Wushi made some manipulations on this matter, linking the tax reform with some of Gao Gong's reforms in the past. For example, Gao Wushi's establishment of the Customs Administration was linked to Gao Gong's previous "Longqing Kaihai".

Originally, the taxation of those ports had to be collected through the Municipal Ship Lifting Department. However, although the Municipal Ship Lifting Department in Daming had contact with the Ministry of Households, it had little relationship. The Ministry of Household Affairs has no control over anything in the tax collection process.

Gao Yushi is very annoyed by this situation. What he needs now is a "big household department", and what he needs to do is to unify the central financial power.For a traveler like him who came from the Red Dynasty system, the most basic idea of ​​economic work is "macro-control and micro-guidance". Now that the central government can't even unify financial power, should it take the lead to regulate?Can only be ridiculed.

The Customs Office and the Audit Office serve this purpose.The Customs Administration is to take back various financial rights one by one to the household center, and the Audit Office is even more "vicious"-even if there are still some financial rights that cannot be recovered for a while due to historical problems, then I will also be responsible for them. Hold high above your heads the sword of Damocles.

Even if I can't directly ask you to do this or that, I can tell you clearly: If you can't do what I want, my sword will kill you!
The Audit Office, in fact, puts a curse on each yamen or officials with financial power, like setting up a patrol outside the chief secretary.

You say I don't care about you?Yes, theoretically I can't control you.

You said you dare not listen to me?Ha ha, then you try it.

This is why Gao Pragmatism originally planned to eliminate all taxes in kind except grain and cloth after the customs office and the audit office were fully opened.

However, it has to be advanced now.
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(End of this chapter)