Daming Yuanfu

Chapter 2084 Zheng Guoben (卌九) kills pigs and raises integrity

Seeing this group of important court officials who were obviously in a sluggish state, most likely wondering how many fat pigs in the world were willing to be slaughtered by Mr. Gao Ge, Gao Wushi felt a little helpless.It seems that if they don't put their interests first, they won't be able to listen to their follow-up disaster relief measures.

"Cough!" Gao Wushi cleared his throat, clapped his hands, and said, "Everyone, everybody!"

Seeing that it was Mr. Gao Ge who spoke, everyone managed to recover from the hysterical state, and their out-of-focus eyes turned to the butcher... er, this great master planner looked over.

"Everyone, I have been busy fighting wars in the past few years. Although the Ministry of Household Affairs has carried out some effective financial reforms, it has increased a lot of revenue. But the Ministry of the Cabinet also knows that the government has maintained a low salary for officials since the founding of the country. Under the system, many scholars studied hard and were promoted to official status, but they couldn't even afford to hire a master butler.

What's more, such as Haigong Gangfeng, who is honored as the governor of Yingtian, but his family is poor and rarely eats meat. How can he not be lamented?Therefore, a few years ago, the Ministry of the Pavilion reported to the Emperor of Ming Dynasty to provide a little salary for the officials of the world..."

As soon as he mentioned this matter, no matter which faction the officials attending the meeting were from, they had to bow their bodies to show their thanks.It is true that the salaries of officials in the Ming Dynasty were so low before, Gao Yushi’s actions that time really benefited everyone, and more importantly, the money he spent to increase his salary was also obtained through various reforms. It does not increase the burden on the people much, which is especially rare.

In fact, many people couldn't help but come up with an idea in their minds: If Mr. Gao Ge doesn't mess around in the future, this article alone is worth a "Wen Zheng"!

At this time, Gao Wushi waved his hand to stop everyone from singing their praises, and continued: "Although this is the case, according to the calculations of the headquarters, the salaries of officials are actually still relatively low at present, which is greatly detrimental to the imperial court."

Eh?The low salaries of officials are actually not conducive to the court?
Everyone was a little stunned after hearing his words. Didn't the low salary of officials reduce the expenditure of the court? Why is it not beneficial to the court?
Gao Yushi seemed to know what they were thinking, and said with a slight smile: "The low salary of officials certainly reduces the expenditure of the court, but officials also need to spend on food and clothing, recruit the shogunate, and hire servants, so that the government affairs of a place can be truly implemented. It worked, didn't it? But what if he had no money?

Either with shawls and eyelashes, gall and liver, exhausted in office, but not doing everything well; or neglecting government affairs, allowing them to be corrupt and powerless, making the people complain and the gentry dissatisfied; and the worst one is Turning into a rat, greedy for ink, bullying the imperial court above and the common people below, it can be said to be infinitely harmful. "

These words really reached everyone's heart, and they all expressed their agreement. Only Chen Yubi, who is the official secretary, was a little uneasy, and said with a little hesitation: "Could it be that Mr. Ge wants to follow the example of the Song Dynasty, follow the example of the post-career Tian Yanglian or Something like that? If so, the Headquarters would have to persuade the elders to think twice—neither the Qingli New Deal nor Wang Anshi’s reforms have succeeded in this regard.”

Gao Wushi understood what Chen Yubi meant, but he hadn't thought about the method of maintaining integrity in the field of employment. Of course, he also understood why Chen Yubi immediately thought of the field of employment.

Almost throughout the feudal dynasty period in China, officials received salaries in many forms, which can be roughly divided into four types: land, grain, objects and coins.

In the pre-Qin period, salaries were basically based on real objects and land.Later, it gradually developed into food and coins, but they were all linked to the fields.After all, China has always been a big agricultural country, and the topic of land cannot be avoided.

In the Northern Wei Dynasty, the imperial court did not distribute money and food to officials. Instead, they directly allocated a piece of land of a corresponding size according to the official rank, and let the officials collect rent by themselves. This is the origin of the job field.

During the Northern Wei Dynasty, the job field was used to pay wages.At that time, the imperial court was also lazy, and they were afraid to trouble themselves, so collecting rent for yourself became the most convenient way to pay wages.You send it to yourself, and you can figure out how much you send and how little you send.Of course, you will definitely not exceed the "market price" too much, otherwise no one will be willing to be a tenant for your family.

However, with the gradual development of the economy, the situation has changed. The scope of the job field is getting bigger and bigger. This is not paying wages, it is almost ready to be divided.

For example, there is a comment on this in "Song History": "Whether there is a job field, select people and be close to the people as small envoys, and each member will receive ten guanwen per month for tea soup. Although there is a job field, it is less than ten guanwen per month." , are all supplemented, so the benefit of raising integrity is given to them. Fearing that the sick people will be judged and verified by the county magistrate, and the fields that cannot be cultivated will be removed, and the excessive amount will be lost.”

For this reason, the imperial court took back the job fields and paid the corresponding salaries to the officials.In the Song Dynasty, the economy was extremely developed, and a new problem appeared, that is, the situation of corruption was too serious.

At the very beginning, Song Renzong raised the issue of corruption when he presided over the Qingli New Deal, hoping that the court could properly arrange jobs.It is a pity that the Qingli New Deal failed in the end, so the burden of reform fell on Wang Anshi.

Wang Anshi's forehead became hot, and he said that solving the corruption problem is very simple, that is, high salary and honesty!As long as the officials are paid high enough wages, then of course they will not be corrupt.For this reason, Wang Anshi decided to distribute jobs to officials as rewards other than salary.

He wants to put an end to the problem of corruption, but has the problem really been solved?How can it be!

It has to be said that Wang Anshi's idea can only be described as naive—yes, you Wang Anshi may have enough moral consciousness, but as long as the salary is in place, corruption is absolutely impossible.However, there are so many officials in the world, how many can you find with your awareness?I'm afraid most are far from it.

There is no need to pay taxes on the job field, it is purely the income of the officials themselves.Sure enough, local officials began to illegally occupy more job fields for various reasons, which turned job fields into a new tool of corruption.

In fact, in addition to basic salary and job income, the income of officials in the Song Dynasty was very rich.For example, they have subsidies for silk and satin, that is, subsidies for buying clothes; tea and wine money, that is, the expenses for drinking tea and drinking; subsidies; horse feed money, that is, the expenses for feeding and drinking for one's own horses, etc.

But even so, it still can't stop the hands of corrupt officials.

After the Song Dynasty, regardless of the Yuan Dynasty, what about Daming?Zhu Yuanzhang has already said many times what he did in the past, so he is too lazy to whip out corpses, so let's talk about Zhang Juzheng's way of doing things in the original history.

Zhang Juzheng's most famous financial reform in later generations is the "one-whip method", although this thing is not his first at all - the initiator is Gui E; it is not even the first one he started to promote vigorously - the first strong promoter For the high arch.But in any case, later generations credited Zhang Juzheng with this credit.

Of course, this algorithm is not completely unreasonable, because after Gui E proposed it, because of too much controversy, the court went on and on, with thunder and rain; The region has not been spread across the country, and his time in power is too short.

Compared with this, Zhang Ju was the first to promote a whipping method in the whole country, and it has been practiced for many years, and it is not a big problem to credit him with the credit, but Gui E and Gao Gong should not be forgotten, that is too unfair .

However, the unified implementation of the whip method across the country, in addition to the unbalanced regional development mentioned many times in this book, which caused the barren areas to suffer, there is also a very serious problem, that is, fire consumption.

Simply put, a whip method is to change all the previous taxes in kind to silver, and only the whole ingot of silver is required.So here comes the question, if all the money is collected, where is there so much money?

To this end, local governments have to find a way.Copper coins and real objects can be exchanged for silver, but they are often collected in scraps of silver, which can be paid taxes, and the government must take these scraps of silver to melt into whole ingots of silver.

However, the process of melting silver has losses.That is to say, one tael of silver will definitely not be able to melt one tael of whole silver.For this reason, the government must charge a fire consumption fee, which is the price difference.In the end, this fire consumption became the main income of local officials.

Relatively conscientious local officials would charge only two or three taels of fire money for one tael of silver, but there were also those unscrupulous guys who could charge half a tael of silver for fire money, which would be fatal.

Zhang Juzheng turned a blind eye to this point, why?Because he—or the imperial court, didn’t want to pay this money. Since the local officials have their own ways to make money, that’s not bad, but it saves the imperial court from spending money on high salaries to support honesty.As for who will be unlucky in the end, Zhang Juzheng doesn't care, or he can't find a way to get the best of both worlds, so he has to "suffer the common people".

After the fall of the Ming Dynasty, the Qing Dynasty basically followed the method of fire consumption, which allowed local officials to make a solid fortune for a period of time.But in the last years of Kang Mazi, corruption became very serious again. In only 80 or [-] years, the Qing Dynasty also began to decay.

In order to change the decadent situation, Yongzheng made new reforms on the fire consumption.This requires a lot of courage, because this reform touches the interests of all local officials in the world.

However, Yongzheng made up his mind and asked officials from all over the country to hand over the fire consumption to the imperial court.That is to say, no matter how much fire consumption you collect for a tael of silver, all of them must be paid as taxes. This is the famous "returning fire consumption to the public".

However, in this way, the local officials would lose a lot of oil and water, and of course they would not agree.For this reason, Yongzheng also had to make a compromise, so he proposed the idea of ​​raising honest banks on a whim.

This method is actually a strange thing, because Yanglianyin is essentially the fire consumption of collecting it. Generally, different grades of Yanglianyin are issued according to the wealth of different regions.And for some reason, the cost of raising money is really high, usually more than ten times the salary, and the highest can even reach a hundred times.

For example, Liu Mingchuan, the governor of Taiwan in the late Qing Dynasty, had an annual salary of only 155 taels, but Yang Lianyin paid more than 1 taels.This shows how outrageously high the number of Yanglian silver is.

Why is Yanglian Bank so high?This matter is a bit complicated to say, and due to space limitations, I will not go into details here.In a word, the amount of Yanglian silver is actually directly proportional to the amount of fire consumption handed over, so officials from all over the country are working harder to hand in fire consumption for their own Yanglian silver - being able to hand in means that they have produced more fire consumption ah.

Of course, what is more interesting about the Qing Dynasty is that Yanglianyin only belongs to local officials, not Beijing officials.But it doesn't matter, the Beijing officials also have a way - I am a central official, can the local officials not curry favor with me?Therefore, there are so-called "charcoal respect" and "ice respect".

As a result, a vicious circle has been formed: when the fire consumption is high, the local officials will get more money to support the honesty and integrity, then they can send more ice and charcoal tributes to the Beijing officials; Will tacitly allow local officials to charge higher fire consumption.

As for who is unlucky, it's not the officials anyway, so whoever it is.

The salaries of officials are too low, which seriously does not match their social status. Do they need high salaries to maintain integrity?Perhaps yes, because this kind of mismatch will stimulate human greed, making officials inevitably find ways to engage in power rent-seeking.

However, although it is not impossible to raise the innocence, it certainly cannot be raised in this way, at least the same group of officials cannot be allowed to control the amount of money for the innocence, because this is not essentially different from paying their own wages.Especially when the source of this money is ordinary people's taxes, the problem is even more serious, which will inevitably lead to severe exploitation of ordinary people.

As a result, Gao Pragmatism came up with a new approach: Don't you guys like exploitation?Okay, let me let you in quietly, but the target of this exploitation is not the ordinary people, but the wealthy businessmen and local gentry.

"Don't worry about Otsuka, this cabinet department doesn't mean that." Gao Wushi said, looking around at everyone, and announced his plan: "The cabinet department means that in the future, the whole country will receive money from the 'third-class system of foreign nobles'." , will be gathered to set up a fund, of which [-]% will be used as officials to support honest banks.

The amount of this fund will be audited at the end of each year, and then distributed to officials across the country according to grade and position around February of the following year, regardless of Beijing officials or foreign officials. "

As soon as this remark came out, everyone couldn't sit still, and subconsciously began to think about the scale of the money, and how much money they could share each year with their own grades.But after thinking about it, I discovered one of the key points: since it is a fixed [-]% ratio, in the final analysis, if the money is to be a little more, it needs the whole country to be willing to spend money to obtain the "third-class foreign prince" that Gao Ge said. There are enough people.

But, how can there be more such big fat pigs... No, there are more such knights, sages, and good gentry?

Gao Yushi looked at the crowd in front of him and smiled without saying a word.

[-], [-], [-], you can't find such a large amount from ordinary people, you can only mobilize wealthy businessmen and local tycoons.

Hmph, in the Ming Dynasty, the poor and the poor were rich, and there were a lot of rich people in the local area. If you don’t squeeze them, then they will just bury their money as family heirlooms, and it will be of no use to the country’s economy...
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Thank you book friend "Cao Mianzi" for your support, thank you!
Thanks to the book friend "Book friend 20170107012220447" for the support of 7 monthly tickets, thank you!

PS: I'm sorry, it may be that I lacked sleep a few days ago. I was a little sleepy after dinner last night. I planned to take a nap, but fell asleep.Woke up at four o'clock in the morning and saw that the big thing was not good, so I hurried to make up this chapter... This chapter is counted as yesterday, and tonight's counts separately.

(End of this chapter)