My life is like walking on thin ice

Chapter 356: Here we are, all old

Chapter 356: Here we are, all old
Liu Rong's words made the old empress dowager fall into deep thought.

Liu Rong was not the only one who understood the importance of the gun;
——It is no exaggeration to say that every qualified feudal emperor is well aware of the importance of guns to himself.

In today's Han Dynasty, as the 'second emperor' of the Han family, successive empress dowagers including Empress Dowager Dou also have a clear understanding of this.

As for the intention revealed by Liu Rong's words, the old empress dowager also understood it clearly.

As for the army, unless it has lofty beliefs and firm convictions like the People's Army of later generations, otherwise, it is basically just a matter of "whoever gives you milk is your mother."

This is especially true in troubled times!

In a well-governed country, this situation will not be exposed in the open, but it is limited to "not being exposed in the open".

Under the fig leaf that Zhishi himself covered, there is still the saying: Whoever gives you milk is your mother.

For an army, the central government's support and the personal support of generals and officers will directly determine whether this army is a national army or a personal armed force.

At the national level, who pays for the support of the army also determines who the army is more "led" by.

The Xiangfu Treasury served as the 'public account' of the Han Dynasty. Everything the Treasury paid for would be controlled by the Xiangfu - or more precisely, by the entire outer court represented by the Xiangfu.

Officials' salaries came from the state treasury, so the prime minister was polite to all other officials and the ministers gave way to him.

The operating funds of the central government come from the treasury of the prime minister's office, so all officials are headed by the prime minister and the outer court follows the prime minister's lead.

If that is the case - if the outer court all recognize the prime minister as their 'parent who provides them with food and clothing', why is there still the emperor who puts pressure on the prime minister?

In addition to spiritual moral restrictions such as the hierarchy between the monarch and his subjects, loyalty, filial piety and human relations, there is another very important reason: the prime minister's treasury is not the prime minister's private property.

Every penny in the national treasury is a stone of rice and a copper coin paid as tax by the people of the world.

And no one paid this tax out of respect for the prime minister or out of submission to him.

Everyone was rushing towards the emperor;
The tax paid was the imperial tax.

Every penny in the prime minister's treasury was collected by the huge Han bureaucracy under the pretext of "paying imperial grain to the emperor."

In other words, the money in the prime minister's treasury also belonged to Liu Rong, the Han emperor.

Why then are the treasury of the prime minister's office and the treasury of the ministerial palace called the 'public account of the Han family' and the 'private pocket of the emperor' respectively?

This is like the business owners of later generations;
The Xiangfu Treasury is the company's public account, responsible for the normal operation of the company and serving as the company's working capital.

Every penny in the public account cannot be misappropriated without authorization, let alone used for personal expenses;

Of course, the corresponding statement is: the money in the corporate account is the limit of the president’s responsibility.

If one day there is no money in the company account, but the company still owes money, then even if the president has personal wealth that is as rich as a country, he does not need to use his own money to fill the company's holes.

The Shaofu Neiku is the personal account of the president.

You can use the money in your personal account to enjoy luxury or to spend it lavishly - as long as you don't use it to commit crimes, no one will care what you do with the money.

The same principle applies to the Han Dynasty today.

——Liu Rong could not embezzle the money in the "public account" of the Prime Minister's Treasury without authorization, and could not use it for personal expenses, such as large-scale construction projects, rewards, and expenses.

But the same thing is: no matter how difficult the prime minister's treasury is, no matter how short of money it is, Liu Rong will not care in theory.

Suppose one day, the treasury of the prime minister's office is so poor that rats can't escape, but the treasury of the vice-ministerial office is so rich that it has nowhere to put its money, then everything in the Han family will become very interesting.

——Without enough money, the entire outer court, which originally relied on the prime minister's treasury for its survival, would inevitably turn to Liu Rong.

Once Liu Rong pays out of his own pocket to solve the problems in the outer court, the prime minister will naturally lose his voice.

As an aside: In Liu Rong's mind, the blueprint for the Han Dynasty's next hundred years already had the embryonic form of such an idea.

Through huge financial pressure, the prime minister was forced to ask the Han emperor for money!

Then the Han emperor bypassed the prime minister, the "public account accountant", and paid directly out of his own pocket to solve the country's financial problems.

Then, the prime minister will become a nobody in the court, and all the rights that originally belonged to the prime minister will be taken back by the emperor.

What followed was inevitably the weakening of the role of the prime minister, which increased the pressure on the emperor to handle government affairs;
Therefore, the "secretary group" institutions such as the cabinet and the Shangshutai came into being...

Closer to home.

At present, the financial situation of the Han Dynasty has actually developed towards the prototype in Liu Rong's mind.

——After the reign of Emperor Wen and Emperor Jing, the two previous emperors of the Han Dynasty lived frugally and left Liu Rong with extremely huge personal wealth.

At the same time, the treasury of the prime minister's office was always on the edge of bankruptcy warning line because of the Han Dynasty's overall national strategy of light taxation and recuperation.

The national treasury has a lot of agricultural tax revenue, nearly 300 million yuan every year!

But there are more places to spend money - fixed expenditures that are required every year and cannot be reduced at all account for more than 80% of the treasury's stipulated income, or even nearly 90%!

Most of the fixed income should be used for fixed expenses;

Apart from agricultural taxes, there is really no other way to make money. The only way to "increase revenue" is to slowly increase the population and land, thereby driving up the total grain production, thereby increasing the agricultural tax revenue of the national treasury.

This is obviously not something that can be accomplished in a short period of time, and it is also impossible to significantly increase the agricultural tax revenue of the national treasury.

——Now the Han Dynasty has more than 6 million households and nearly 30 million people;

According to the standard of "one hundred acres per household" set by Emperor Taizu Gao when he granted land titles to the people, the Han Dynasty should now have 600 million acres, or 6 million hectares, of farmland.

But in fact, after just fifty years of peaceful development, the 100 acres of land that Emperor Taizu Gao once distributed free of charge to each household of the people has shrunk to an average of less than 80 acres per household.

If most farmers no longer own 100 acres of land, perhaps it can be classified as land annexation, with a small number of people occupying most of the farmland;
But since the average farmland owned by each farmer is less than 80 mu, it is no longer the cause of land annexation.

——The first reason is population growth.

Back then, when Emperor Taizu Gao founded the Han Dynasty, the Han Dynasty was founded in the ruins of the late Qin Dynasty, with a total population of only 13 million, less than 3 million households;
If each household has 100 mu of land, that is only 30 million mu of farmland.

In addition, the small acres of land in Guandong means that a hundred acres of land owned by farmers in Guandong is actually only equivalent to fifty acres in Guanzhong.

By this calculation, after Emperor Taizu Gao founded the country, he easily used the 200 million acres of farmland available in the Han Dynasty to resettle all the people in the world.

But fifty years later, the population of the Han Dynasty had already soared from 13 million at the founding of the country to 28 million in the first year of Liu Rong's reign.

The number of farmers has also skyrocketed from less than three million at the founding of the country to more than six million today.

The population and household registration have both increased by more than double;

If the Han Dynasty still had the 200 million mu of farmland it had when the country was founded, the average amount of farmland owned by each Han household would probably have fallen below 50 mu long ago.

The reason why it can be maintained at around 80 acres today is that as the population grows, the arable land area is also increasing.

Open up wasteland.

The abandoned farmland or land that was not farmland was reclaimed as farmland. As a result, the population of the Han Dynasty more than doubled, but the average amount of farmland per household only dropped by 20%.

But it is obvious that during these fifty years, the growth rate of the Han population was undoubtedly much faster than the speed of farmland reclamation and the growth rate of arable land.

Today, the two million or so farming households in Guanzhong alone own as much as 170 million mu of farmland - almost as much as all the farmland of the Han Dynasty when the country was founded!
As for Guandong, the north, and the southern areas outside the Great Wall such as Bashu and Hanzhong, there are more than 4 million farmers who own a total of 180 million mu of land.

Calculated in this way, the average amount of farmland owned by farmers in Kanto is only about 40 mu;

However, the small acres used in Guandong are one step wide and 120 steps long, while the large acres used in Guanzhong are one step wide and 240 steps long.

Therefore, the average farmland owned by farmers in Kanto is only more than 40 mu, but according to the farmland standards in Kanto, the average is more than 80 mu.

And these data are closely related to a fact that makes the prime minister's treasury feel powerless.

——The population and land of the Han Dynasty have reached a growth bottleneck.

In the past fifty years, most of the land that can be reclaimed and cultivated has been reclaimed.

As a result, farmers are now struggling to feed themselves and the land is not enough for farming, but they are still helpless and can only go hungry one day and eat a full meal the next.

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Even if they are hungry, they will not reclaim wasteland and increase the area of arable land. This means that there is not much room left to continue reclaiming and expanding the area of arable land.

Even if the Chang'an court took action at the national level and reclaimed land at all costs, it would not be able to add much new arable land.

10%?
Two percent?

At most, it will increase by 30%.

And this 30% of new land can at most only bring a 30% increase in agricultural tax to the prime minister's treasury - that is, the current annual agricultural tax revenue of about 300 million can barely reach 400 million.

This is the ceiling and it can’t go up any further.

For the current prime minister's office, an extra 100 million yuan in agricultural tax revenue each year seems to be a lot;

But the extra ten million coins meant that the Han family had nearly ten million acres of farmland.

These 10 million acres of new land required corresponding new canals, new roads, and new agricultural officials and tax collectors.

Considering these increases in expenditures that occurred at the same time as the revenue growth, the battle situation in the prime minister's treasury would not improve much at all.

This means that no matter how hard the prime minister's office and the national treasury work, it will be like this.

The money collected from agricultural taxes was barely enough to cover the country's expenses for the year. Either there would be some left over, enough to give officials an extra robe, or there would be a little foreign debt that the country had to shamelessly ask the emperor for.

In sharp contrast, the Shaofu Treasury had an annual fixed income of more than 100 million coins per head of tax and had very little fixed expenditure.

It is not difficult to see from the fact that the two previous emperors, Taizong and Xiaojing, spent more than 30 years to save up a small treasury of up to 20 million coins from the annual head tax of about 100 million coins: as long as the emperor wants to save money, he can save at least 70% of the head tax income of the Shaofu treasury!

If you meet a stingy emperor like Emperor Taizong, it would be no problem for him to save more than 80% of the annual tax income.

Well, the problem is coming.

——Since the Shaofu treasury is so rich, why not use the money to do something for the country?

For example, to feed the army;
For example, subsidizing officials;
For example, building water conservancy projects...

Etc., etc.

Rather than letting the huge wealth of the Shaofu treasury rot in the government treasury, it would be better to use it to build the country.

Since this money came from the emperor's pocket, then everything that was accomplished was naturally the emperor's credit, and the right to speak also belonged to the emperor, the "financial backer".

In the process, the country becomes better and stronger;

The emperor's civil and military achievements became more and more prosperous, and the power in his hands became greater and greater.

The world where the Prime Minister was the only one injured was thus achieved...

"Emperor, do you want to centralize power?"

After a long period of contemplation, the old queen who vaguely realized Liu Rong's long-term intentions asked softly;
Before Liu Rong could recover from his shock, the old queen took a deep breath and said solemnly, "From what you said, the emperor clearly has the intention to suppress the prime minister..."

"Emperor, what exactly is your plan?"

···
The old empress dowager's two light words left Liu Rong stunned for a long time.

After dozens of breaths, Liu Rong took a deep breath and cleared his stunned expression.

At the same time, Liu Rong couldn't help but marvel at the old empress dowager's sensitive political sense.

——It was just that Liu Rong took on too much responsibility and said he would pay out of his own pocket to bear the cost of supporting several standing field armies!
The old empress dowager saw from Liu Rong's seemingly abrupt action what Liu Rong planned to do ten, twenty, or even thirty years later!
With such a sense of smell, even if the emperor has it, he would at least be able to maintain the status quo!

Considering that the Han Dynasty has always been adhering to the national policy of governing by inaction and recuperation since its founding;

In this context, the level of the old empress dowager can at least reach the level of the late Emperor Xiaojing...

"The royal grandmother has a sharp eye."

Having sincerely expressed his admiration for the old queen mother's keen sense of smell, Liu Rong thought for a moment, and finally told her the blueprint he had planned for the Han family in the next few decades.

This lasted for three full hours, from the morning when Liu Rong arrived at Changle Palace to the evening when the sun was setting.

After Liu Rong told almost all of his long-term plans, the old empress was silent for a long time.

Finally, he stood up with a complicated expression and walked towards the back hall.

As she walked, the old queen mother murmured absentmindedly, "I'm old..."

“We are all old…”

···
"Emperor, just do it."

“You only need to know: The highest good is like water.”

"——The previous emperor served as the crown prince for more than 20 years, but he only had the appearance of Emperor Taizong."

"If I can use all of Emperor Taizong's tactics and strategies..."

"What the emperor wants to do, perhaps..."

···
"Ugh……"

"old……"