At the end of Qin, I became a son of the plane

Chapter 517: Four Paths and Helpless Choices
After this meeting of princes, Kuai Che finally understood that their biggest enemy was not the craftsmen and farmers, who at most wanted some money. But the nobles of the Han Dynasty blocked their way to further progress. If they did not defeat the power of the nobles of the Han Dynasty, they would never be able to change their current fate of pigs and sheep.

Now, not only can they not deal with the Mohists, but they have to find a way to unite with them and oppose the feudal forces in the Han Dynasty. They are like dark clouds covering the Han Dynasty. If they don't blow away these clouds, these merchants will never have a future.

In March of the 23rd year of the Han Dynasty, Qin Bo, the president of Mozi Academy, invited Kuai Che to Mozi Academy to teach students the contents of "The Theory of Heavenly Dao". This news shocked the entire academic community of the Han Dynasty. You should know that a few years ago, the giants Qin Bo and Kuai Che fought very fiercely, and they would never win even if it meant life or death. But no one expected that the two would end up together.

Of course, scholars of the Han Dynasty also acknowledged that Kuai Che's "On the Way of Heaven" was meaningful and could be considered a relatively novel academic viewpoint. As soon as "On the Way of Heaven" was published, Kuai Che became a master in the academic circles of the Han Dynasty.

On March 15th, in Kuai Che's study at Mozi Academy, merchants from all over the Han Dynasty who supported Kuai Che gathered there.

Ren Ming said happily: "Kuai Che, your "Theory of Heaven" is in great demand in Luoyang City. All the students in Luoyang are proud to read "Theory of Heaven". Survival of the fittest has become the catchphrase of Luoyang students. But I still prefer what Kuai Zi said about the sanctity and inviolability of private property. This speaks to the hearts of merchants like us."

Over the past few hundred years, Luoyang has been the city with the strongest commercial atmosphere. There are also many small and medium-sized workshop owners in Luoyang. They have been disgusted with the all-controlling model of Qin law for hundreds of years. Although the Han law is better, it is still a big government model that controls everything from heaven to earth. There are many restrictions on them. In addition, no government respects private property. Therefore, Kuai Che proposed that private property is sacred and inviolable and free competition, which touched the hearts of these people. "On the Way of Heaven" was in short supply in Luoyang.

Wu Yande was also excited and said: "When I saw this sentence, I was shocked by Kuai Zi's words. This is simply the truth of the great Dao. This sentence has been written down and hung in the study to read every day."

These merchants quickly became rich because of the Han Dynasty's national policy of industrialization, but they did have some hidden worries in their hearts. Their biggest worry was that they didn't know how to keep the property in their hands.

They were very clear about the Han Dynasty's view of them. They were the fat pigs kept by the imperial court. They would be the ones to eat any changes in the imperial court. Faced with this situation, they did not even dare to resist. Kuai Che's words seemed to wake them up a little. Why did they have to be the fat pigs of the imperial court instead of being normal people? Their own property was also earned bit by bit by them.

Kuai Che smiled and said, "The Theory of Heaven's Way speaks for merchants like us. Times have changed. The emperor today has acknowledged that the world belongs to everyone, and merchants like us naturally have a share in this world. Don't look at the huge power of the Han nobles now, but they are already in a state of decline. But if they withdraw from the Han officialdom, we may be able to take advantage of the situation."

Ren Ming then remembered that Kuai Che had offended the aristocratic forces of the Han Dynasty and was even besieged by a marquis named Cao. If he had the emperor's guards, the consequences would be unimaginable.

He said worriedly, "We cannot afford to offend the nobles of the Han Dynasty. They can crush us to death with just one finger."

People like Ren Ming are not as confident as Kuai Che. In the court of the Han Dynasty, the three dukes and nine ministers are almost all of aristocratic origin. The prefects with 2000 stones and the generals of important cities are also aristocrats, not to mention the huge system of princes outside the Han Dynasty. It can be said that the aristocratic system that has declined since the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period has been resurrected by the current emperor. They dare not deal with such a behemoth.

Kuai Che smiled and said, "The nobles are powerful, but there is someone more powerful than them, that is the emperor. Don't think that the world has revived the declining aristocratic system, but the emperor does not like the nobles, otherwise he would not have forcefully purged the nobles of the six countries.

The princes of the Han Dynasty can open up their homes for Chinese civilization, so the emperor supports them. But you didn't realize that while supporting the princes, the emperor kept moving the feudal lords out of the Han Dynasty, and even gave the new continent to the princes. Now is the most prosperous time for the Han Dynasty nobles, and they will gradually decline in the future. Even if the emperor cherishes his reputation and is unwilling to deal with his subordinates, the new emperor will definitely dislike these powerful ministers and generals. "

"When the power of the Han nobles declines, we will naturally come to the fore. When the Fuminxue takes control of the Han government, we can implement the law that private property is sacred and inviolable. By then, even the emperor will not be able to enter our mansions."

Look at what the monarchs of various countries in the Warring States Period did. They all replaced the feudal aristocracy with centralized power. This is the general trend of the world, and even the current emperor cannot stop it. The decline of the aristocracy is the day for merchants like us to rise.

Kuai Che's words gave the others hope. They admired him and said, "We wish Kuai Zi's teaching of enriching the people will dominate the Han Dynasty."

March 15th, Mozi Academy lecture hall.

At this time, the room was already full of students, and the core group in the first row of the lecture hall were the current emperor, Prime Minister Zhou Zhang, Zhang Liang, Mohist giant Qin Bo and other bigwigs. With these people suppressing the noise, the lecture hall, which should have been noisy, was now somewhat quiet.

Kuai Che went up to the podium and was a little excited to see the emperor present, but he quickly calmed down and said, "Today I will talk to all the students about the content of "The Theory of Heaven". The Theory of Heaven is a combination of studying the emperor's theory of position and my observation of nature. All things in nature are in fierce competition. I will use wolves and rabbits in nature as an example. They are a link in the food chain that the emperor talked about. The wolf must catch up with the slowest rabbit, otherwise it will starve to death, and the rabbit must also find a way to escape from the fastest wolf, otherwise it will be eaten by the wolf. This is the fierce competition among all things. When no rabbit can escape from the wolf, even if there are many rabbits in this world, they will be eaten by wolves sooner or later. At that time, there will naturally be no creatures like rabbits. This is called natural selection."

"This principle can also be applied to the industries of our Han Dynasty. All major industries of the Han Dynasty are also facing fierce competition. Whoever can produce goods with higher efficiency and lower prices will be the wolf in the industry, and those workshops that cannot adapt to the development of the industry will be the rabbits. The weak in this kind of industrial competition will be devoured by the strong. This is the natural way of competition."

"But now the industrial environment of our Han Dynasty is not like the law of the jungle where the strong prey on the weak and the fittest survive. Instead, there are many rabbit-like workshops that produce under the protection of the court. However, when there are too many rabbits, they eat up all the grass. The backward workshops occupy the market, making it impossible for the strong to swallow up the weak. The backward production capacity cannot be eliminated, and the economic crisis will naturally break out. I think that if the industry of the Han Dynasty can operate like the selfless law of heaven and not interfere with the mergers between industries, the outbreak of crises can be reduced, and even if a crisis breaks out, it can be quickly improved."

Zhang Liang laughed and said, “Kuai Che did find some excuses for the greed of merchants, but he did fill in some gaps in the Legalist model.”

Xu Fan said: "Although what you said makes some sense, it is only a minor point. As long as merchants do not return the surplus value they occupy to the world, the economic crisis is still inevitable."

No generation has ever been able to control production capacity as well as the later generations. Even steel plants with a capacity of one million tons were called small blast furnaces. They simply blasted the plants to remove production capacity, but it was still useless. Consumption could not be increased, and the economic crisis was still looming.

Zhang Liang said: "Your Majesty is the most foreseeable about economic crises. Why don't you learn from it and teach it to the people of the world?"

Xu Fan could only smile bitterly. He did want to write, but the key was that he only knew one or two points. As for the declaration, he only knew the first sentence at the beginning, and he had no idea what the content was.

Zhou Zhang looked at Kuai Che who was speaking eloquently in the lecture hall, frowned and said: "Your Majesty, I don't like this man. He is a conspirator. His "Theory of Heaven" seems to be talking about the development of industry, but in fact it is to promote merchants. These merchants are no longer satisfied with the wealth they have obtained in the Han Dynasty, and now they want to pursue political status. I can see their ambition to rule the world. What private property is sacred and inviolable? I am afraid they just want to protect their own property. In the Han Dynasty, land is state-owned and workshops are government-run. These belong to the whole world. He is trying to shake the foundation of the Han Dynasty by acquiring private property. If the court really listens to him and the powerful do not pay attention, there will be propertyless refugees all over the world. When these people are starving to death, who will care about the issue of private property or public property? These refugees will completely destroy the Han Dynasty. "Zhou Zhang may not be as good as Zhang Liang in academics, but he has experienced three dynasties and has seen everything. In troubled times, what private property can you talk about when you don't even own your own life? Kuai Che's theory seems to be for the people of the world, but in fact he still wants to protect the money of merchants.

This theory is actually an attempt to shirk responsibility. If merchants are ruled by the rulers, they are right to say this. They should find ways to protect their own interests.

But after becoming the rulers and maintaining the order of the whole world, it has become the responsibility of these merchants. Continuing to talk about the sanctity of private property is just shirking responsibility by covering one's ears and stealing the bell. You have occupied the interests of the people of the world. You should serve the people of the world. Even if the standards are lowered, you must ensure that the people of the world can survive.

If everyone can't survive, a landlord will hold the land deed and say that the land belongs to him. Let those refugees get out! Then the refugees can only put the landlord in an iron pot and stew a feast.

Xu Fan said calmly: "The Han Dynasty is not the world of one person, but the world of all people. Naturally, merchants also have a share of the world. Kuai Che wants to rule the world. As long as they have the ability, there is nothing wrong with it. The world of the Han Dynasty allows them to have such an idea."

Of course Xu Fan knew what Kuai Che and the others were thinking. There was a country like this in later generations. They would not let go of any profitable business, but would shirk responsibility when faced with things that required them to be responsible. The prisons were private, the fire stations were private, and even the police were about to become private.

In fact, successive rulers in Chinese history were extremely wary of the merchant class. After all, if merchants were rich and held power, then the emperor would have no place to stand. Therefore, successive emperors always restricted their access to power. Obviously, these emperors saw the threat that merchants posed to their rule.

But Xu Fan saw the future situation and asked him to make a choice now: would the Han Dynasty become a feudal aristocracy, a feudal bureaucracy, a workshop owner system, or a craftsman system? Naturally, he wanted the Han Dynasty to take the fourth path, and he had been moving in this direction for decades.

But he was not sure that the Han Dynasty would really go down this path, and he was also worried that this step was too big and would end up in trouble. But if the fourth path was temporarily unavailable, he would still choose the third path, after all, this path also represented the future, although this path was a bit brutal, with internal exploitation and external invasion. If he really took the first and second paths, the Han Dynasty would still be circling in the cycle of order and chaos, so what was the point of his time travel, just to turn Liu Bang, the first emperor of the Han Dynasty, into Xu Fan!
Zhou Zhang could only smile bitterly when he heard this. He had forgotten that His Majesty had never considered the world as his own. If the merchants were really capable of governing the people of the world well, the emperor would not care about their behavior in power.

Instead, Xu Fan asked, "Did Zhou Ce go to the New World?"

Zhou Zhang nodded and said, "He always thinks that I have restricted his development. Now let him go to the New World to explore. What he can achieve will depend on his own ability."

Zhou Zhang felt guilty about his eldest son. After knowing that he wanted to establish a vassal state in the New World, he fully supported Zhou Ce's move.

Xu Fan said, "It may not be impossible to make it to the New World at this time. The nobles of our Han Dynasty enjoy the highest honor and the support of the people. Naturally, they should also open up living space for the people of our Han Dynasty. Zhou Ce's choice shows that he is still a good man of our Han Dynasty. I will let the court support him in his development."

Xu Fan hoped that all the feudal lords in the Han Dynasty would establish vassal states in order to reduce the feudal forces within the Han Dynasty. According to Xu Fan's vision for the Han Dynasty, industrialization would be carried out within the Han Dynasty, while the internal feudal forces would be eliminated. Externally, the vassal states would be used as iron plows for pioneering, allowing them to use the feudal system to open up the wilderness and open up new opportunities for the industrialization of the Han Dynasty. To some extent, this could be considered a dual-track system.

Zhou Zhang smiled when he heard this and said, "Thank you, Your Majesty."

In the lecture hall, Kuai Che had finished his lecture on "The Theory of Heavenly Way". When it was the students' turn to speak, the students present raised their hands one after another, and Kuai Che called on a student.

The student stood up and said, "Kuai Zi, three years ago you debated with the Legalists, and at that time the Legalists used a model to defeat your ideas about enriching the people. Today in The Wheel of Heaven, I did not see you find a way to solve this problem. Although eliminating obsolete production capacity can indeed delay the economic crisis, as long as the wealth occupied by merchants does not flow into the whole world, there will be a gap in the wealth of the world, and an economic crisis is inevitable."

"In the past three years, the Legalists have established government-run workshops in Chen County. The imperial court controls the workshops on behalf of all the people in the world, which is equivalent to controlling the right to distribute wealth. The Legalists' model will not lead to an economic crisis. From the current situation, it is obvious that the Legalists are more suitable for this era than you."

As soon as he finished speaking, the students on the scene applauded. Although these students were not all Mohists, they were vigorous and idealistic young people of the Han Dynasty. Obviously, compared with the selfish and self-interested school of enriching the people, the students on the scene still preferred the Legalist state-run model. The most important thing was that this model solved the economic crisis that the Han Dynasty encountered every 10 years.

Now the economic crisis has become the most serious contradiction of the Han Dynasty, because it has only broken out twice. Both the academic circles and ordinary people in the Han Dynasty have insufficient understanding of the economic crisis, but every time a crisis breaks out, everyone suffers. Now, whoever among the various schools of thought can solve this problem will be supported by people all over the world.

At this stage, only the Legalists are truly challenging the economic crisis, and the model they established is reasonable. The economic crisis is not a capacity crisis caused by unfair distribution, so the court can solve the crisis by controlling the workshops. The workshops belong to the court, and they are afraid that no one will buy the goods they produce. Even if they are distributed to every Han citizen, the crisis will be solved.

Kuai Che said calmly: "The Legalist model is problematic. He said that merchants like me occupy wealth, which means we take this part of the wealth from the world. This conclusion is wrong. Am I not part of the world? How can the wealth I occupy not be part of the world? This shows that there is no shortage of wealth in the world."

The student immediately said, "Then you can't spend all this wealth, you can only accumulate it. If this wealth is not circulated, it will naturally form a gap."

Kuai Che said: "This statement is also problematic. First of all, the first point is that the wealth of merchants can be spent. Now it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to build a blast furnace in the Han Dynasty. In the foreseeable future, the price of blast furnaces can only become more and more expensive. As long as merchants want to adapt to the increasingly fierce competition, their accumulated wealth will definitely join this cruel competition, so these wealth will not be lost."

"Secondly, merchants like us are not the owners of wealth, but the managers of wealth. Wealth will not disappear out of thin air. My husband is not immortal. I am over 60 years old this year, and I obviously don't have many years left to live. If my fellow villagers and others die, will the wealth disappear? No, it will be controlled by others."

The student said disdainfully: "Will this wealth be controlled by your offspring?"

Kuai Che continued with a smile, "My descendants will die too. As long as there is no one who is immortal, this wealth will continue to circulate. In my opinion, when wealth exceeds a person's daily expenses, he is no longer the owner of the wealth but only the manager of the wealth. If he wants to increase the value of this wealth, he must join the fierce market competition, buy new machines, hire new craftsmen, and the wealth will naturally circulate throughout the world. If my descendants are some prodigals who live off their wealth, then there is no need to worry. The wealth they have in their hands will sooner or later flow back to the whole world."

(End of this chapter)