Daming Yuanfu

One hundred thousand iron cavalry, three million taels - provided that only a lance was replaced.

This does not include horses, equipment, sabers, tabards, kettles and other personal equipment, or even ammunition. Not to mention the barracks, cooking utensils, food, vegetables and meat, bedding, marching tents and other materials needed by this army every day, as well as, crucially, at least several very large horse farms needed to maintain this cavalry.

If all of these are taken into account, this first-class cavalry of 100,000 will cost the Ming Dynasty at least tens of millions of taels of silver. Of course, this money does not need to be taken out all at once, after all, a lot of money has already been spent before.

The economic foundation determines the strength of an army to a large extent, because economic conditions are rigid conditions and can often be regarded as the lower limit guarantee of the army's combat effectiveness. This is not to say that organizational structure, discipline, morale, integrity, tactical literacy, etc. are not important, but these latter are soft conditions and are used to increase the upper limit rather than guarantee the lower limit.

There is a joke in later generations: "If the Ming army is not satisfied with its pay, it will be invincible if it is fully paid." Does it make sense? Yes, it's just not comprehensive.

Why do people in later generations like to joke that "the Ming army is not satisfied with its pay, but is invincible if it is fully paid"? Because facts have proven that the combat effectiveness of the Ming army often surged immediately after surrendering. Those who didn't dare to fight before now dare to fight; those who couldn't be beaten before now collapse in a rush. So much so that after this ridicule, two more sentences were added: "Where is the full pay, the Eight Banners of the Han Dynasty are closed."

This is embarrassing. You have billions of people in the prosperous Central Plains, but you can't afford full wages. However, the Taqing, which only has a mere land outside the customs, can afford full wages. Under such a situation, who will perish if you don't perish?

Therefore, although there are many indirect causes of death in the Ming Dynasty, there is no doubt that the direct cause of death lies in finance, especially military finance.

Highly pragmatic The main idea of ​​previous reforms was to increase revenue, that is, to increase fiscal revenue. In terms of reducing expenditures, basically only two things were done: opening vassal bans and modifying inns.

The former does not need to be elaborated one by one, while the latter can be explained a little. Why do these two highly pragmatic cost-cutting measures only include these two measures? Let’s talk about the first point first, that is, opening the vassal ban. This matter essentially does not have much practical pressure. As long as the emperor is willing to do it, the court can do it at any time, and it will not face much resistance.

Where is the resistance to opening the vassal ban? It lies in Zhu Yuanzhang's ancestral precepts and the Confucian idea of ​​"kissing one another". It was Zhu Yuanzhang's national policy to enfeoff vassal kings, and the two main reasons for Zhu Yuanzhang's doing so were: first, to protect the central government with his own vassal; second, to spread the branches of his descendants.

The defense of the Central Committee actually went bankrupt after the Battle of Jingnan. It was too late to prevent you from doing so. How can we still expect you to defend the Central Committee? But the emperor needs to save face, especially an emperor with insufficient legitimacy like Zhu Di. This face must be tightened even more.

Therefore, although he had to change his father's "ancestral system" and change the princes from all over the country from real princes to virtual princes, in order to save face, he had to compensate financially and create an independent system. The vassal pig-raising system with the characteristics of the Ming Dynasty - you are not allowed to do anything except create people, but I promise: I will give you enough money.

The subsequent development has been mentioned in the previous article, so it will not be stated here. In short, the final result was that the clan cost millions and spent countless money, and the court could no longer afford it. The boss of the Ming Dynasty's finances wasted a piece of his expenses in vain.

However, this system is not impossible to change. As long as the current emperor dares to slap the "gentleman's agreement" between Chengzu and the clan in fact, then it will be changed. What can the clan do? No, because they have been raised like pigs for two hundred years, and now they have no military power, no ability, and no courage to even do anything to rebel.

What's more, although the high-level clan members are living a happy life, the lower-level clan members are in extreme misery - the court cannot afford the money, the clan's regular salary has been delayed again and again, and they are not allowed to support themselves, so they can only sit and wait to starve to death. So many clan members deliberately committed crimes in order to go to Fengyang clan prison to have a stable meal. Isn't this miserable?

Therefore, Gao Wu's strength pushed for the reform of the clan, using the excuse that the imperial court needed to save money for the Northern Expedition to the remaining Yuan Dynasty, and successfully promoted the ban on opening vassals and restructuring, and finally cut off the huge financial waste in this area, which was regarded as a major savings.

But don't forget that he did not deliberately eliminate a large number of clan lords. Therefore, if future generations evaluate this reform, it must be that "the reform is not thorough" - he still spends more than one million taels on clan salary every year. silver.

More importantly, Gao Pragmatic did not forcibly take back the large amounts of fields and other production materials that these clan kings had seized through various means in the early days. He only conducted an inventory and confiscated part of them, and then put them into the private market at a relatively low price. , used to alleviate land conflicts.

To a certain extent, this is still an "incomplete reform", because even though Gao Pragmatic sent many mathematics graduates from Jinghua Craftsman School as reviewers for this batch of land auctions, he also asked Jinghua Bank to provide land purchasers with Loans cannot guarantee that these lands will be sold to ordinary people.

The facts are before our eyes. The proportion of ordinary people who dare to borrow money from banks to buy land is too low. Therefore, most of the land is still bought by small landowners and rich farmers from all over the country - why small landowners? Because there were regulations at that time, all relatives within the five families of the family together and owning more than 3,000 acres of land were not allowed to purchase these "legally auctioned fields". Violators would be fined the land and all purchase fees.

Of course, there are many detailed rules, such as land buyers are based on a household basis and are not allowed to purchase more than one hundred acres of land at a time, etc. In short, although Gao Pragmatic hopes to ensure the interests of the small people as much as possible, in the end it will be difficult to truly benefit the extremely poor. If anything, it is actually just distributing part of the land that was too concentrated in the hands of top landowners to small and medium-sized landowners.

Does this count as alleviating land conflicts? It counts, but only to a limited extent. Is there any help for the extremely poor? Yes, because the oppression of tenant farmers by small landowners was relatively light.

Why does Gao pragmatism do this? Does he not know the real situation at the bottom of society? No, it's just because he knows that the big landowners often have official or privileged backgrounds, and their tenant farmers have a very strong dependence on them, and they are often oppressed to death by them. However, tenants and long-term workers have nothing to do because they can't resist the power. .

This is not the case for small landowners. It is difficult for them to force tenant farmers, because tenant farmers can just walk away. Therefore, small landowners can only provide more concessions to tenant farmers to ensure that their land is cultivated, especially to those tenants with excellent skills and labor force, including long-term workers. In Gao Pragmatic's previous life, when he was young, he heard his ancestors tell a lot about the true history before liberation. One of them said that (small) landowners had to distribute some meat and cloth to the tenant farmers during festivals. Otherwise, people will make comparisons. A certain family (landowner) in Linxiang and Linxian is generous. Let’s go to their house next year to work.

Also, if someone was needed to do something temporary or extra, the (small) landlord would even go to the door in person to invite them, speak politely, and invite them to have a meal at home after the work was done, or even give them a small gift (a few kilograms of rice, a few ounces of meat, etc.). Otherwise, he would worry about disappointing them and they might not work for him next year.

This made Gao pragmatic know that although small landowners are also landlords and essentially live on the "surplus labor value" of tenants and long-term workers, their relationship with tenants and long-term workers is not as antagonizing as imagined. In many cases, it is the opposite. It's quite harmonious, and it's a win-win situation to some extent.

In essence, this is a social phenomenon that can be reasonably explained, and even has some characteristics of a "free economy". In this case, Gao Pragmatism certainly does not exclude the expansion of the group of "small landowners". It would be better if the group of small landowners were expanded while weakening the large landowners, because this would indeed alleviate social conflicts.

Regarding the land issue, later generations often criticized "excessive concentration of land", rather than saying that as long as the land is concentrated, it will be finished immediately. A certain degree of concentration can actually increase the people's ability to resist risks. The key lies in the specific degree of this concentration and in which region this concentration occurs - the Loess Plateau in northern Shaanxi and the land of fish and rice in Huguang. Can it be generalized?

You have hundreds of acres of land in Huguang Plain, which can manage the smooth lives of dozens of families. One of them is a landlord, and the rest are tenants and long-term workers. It doesn't matter if there are some disasters. The landlords have some surplus food. They use it to help everyone and get through the disaster years. The days to come will still be long. Even the landlord can organize low-intensity disaster relief, which is a "time-tested social system."

But it's different on the Loess Plateau. Hundreds of acres of land may not produce much. It's good to be able to support a dozen families, so their ability to resist risks is also very poor. If the nomadic people outside the customs can't survive now, and they come over and sweep them away, then it's over, everyone will go bankrupt and flee, and the local social system will collapse, creating a wave of "social instability" ".

Why did ancient uprisings mostly occur in the north? The above is one of the important reasons. In the final analysis, social productivity determines everything, including the form of social organization.

In addition to opening vassal bans, another cost-saving policy adopted by Gao pragmatism lies in the reform of post stations. The previous article on this reform has made it clear enough that it is essentially a market-oriented reform while retaining certain "government-run" characteristics. This is nothing new to Gao Pragmatic, who was born as a grassroots cadre. The big principles and ideas can be copied directly from the homework.

It can be understood this way: after the reform, the management of the post stations is like the cadres of the business department. Each post station is under a certain "contracting system" and is responsible for its own profits and losses. The imperial court used "contracting rights" in exchange for them to undertake some of the tasks required by the imperial court, such as horses for delivering military reports, boat transfers, and officials' meals and lodging along the way.

By the way, Gao Pragmatic has repeatedly tightened the standards for food and accommodation for officials using the inns. Users who exceed the standards will be included in the evaluation system of the examination method - if you want to be promoted or at least not dismissed from office, then you'd better not eat at the inns. The accommodation exceeds the standard.

But the interesting thing here is that the post station is a contract system, and providing higher-end food and accommodation is part of the way for the management of the post station to make money. Therefore, if the officials who come to the post station are willing to spend their own money to improve the standard of food and accommodation, the post station can't ask for it, and even Will actively promote.

However, as long as the officials are not spending money from the Ministry of Revenue, Gao Pragmatic is happy to see the results - increasing social consumption is a very desirable thing. He, Gao, only advocates frugality for the court, but never for the rich.

Everyone is trying their best to tighten their belts and get by, which means insufficient consumption, which will suffer on the production side. Underconsumption will lead to overproduction, and overproduction will lead to a backlog of products, which will then lead to lower profits in the production department and ultimately production cuts. At this time, practitioners in the production department will also be affected and their income will decrease, which will further lead to even less consumption... and thus fall into a death spiral. , the economic crisis broke out.

Didn’t Gao Pragmatic notice the price changes some time ago? In essence, this is mainly a price increase caused by a large inflow of external precious metals. Although this change was a good thing in the early stage, because the Ming Dynasty originally had insufficient money supply and was actually in a state of deflation, but after years of high pragmatism in promoting overseas trade, Now that the precious metal money supply is sufficient, we have to start thinking about inflation again.

Of course, there is also the influence of the Federal Reserve's small-denomination banknotes. After all, banknotes cannot be issued just by depositing one tael of silver in the bank. You must issue more, otherwise this industry will have no value.

In short, the essence of economics is that if there is too much water, add noodles, and if there is too much noodles, add water. Therefore, now that we are starting to worry about inflation, we must let the court spend more money, and there is another key point here: although this money needs to be spent, it is best not to flow into the private market all at once.

what to do? Carrying out large-scale infrastructure construction is naturally the easiest way for Gao Pragmatic to think of, but Gao Yuanfu was impeached when Jinghua Infrastructure was engaged in sewerage projects some time ago, so now he must take a step back.

Therefore, allowing the imperial court to expand arms procurement has become something that Gao pragmatism must promote.

On the one hand, the imperial court spends money on arms procurement while the military-industrial complex makes money. This money flows from the military-industrial system to the private sector relatively slowly, which is in line with the current needs of the government.

On the other hand, the imperial court spent such a large sum of money to increase the strength of the army, but the emperor and court officials will definitely feel that I have spent so much money, and if I just let them guard the border, then I am not losing a lot. Sent? No, I have to make the money well spent.

How can you get your money’s worth? Of course, "neighbors collect grain and I collect guns, and neighbors are my granaries." With so much military spending going on, how can we make back the money without doing some income-generating projects?

Of course, Gao Pragmatic would not explain this to the emperor right away. Anyway, as long as the matter reached that point, the emperor and the court officials would definitely be anxious about it. Then he would just put forward another expansion goal. Anyway, the goal has already been set: the one to the west. Two basins.

As for now, just convince the emperor to spend the money. This is not a problem for him, Gao Yuanfu.
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