Chapter 438: The Great Plan of Ding Ge (Part II)
When Song Xiance and Xu Zhiyuan were working day and night for the Tamna court, Chu Fan was not idle, in addition to constantly answering questions and solving doubts for the two, he was also revising and reviewing the "Tamna Law" based on the "Da Ming Law"; In addition to the "Da Ming Law" itself, Chu Fan also had to refer to the various laws and regulations of the Ming Dynasty as a supplement to the "Da Ming Law", and the workload was quite large. Pen, fun, pavilion www. biquge。 info
In this process, Chu Fan found that if you only look at it on paper, Daming is quite generous to the people, the most typical ones are "Nursing Home", "Huimin Pharmacy" and "Leaky Garden", which are equivalent to the nursing home, universal medical insurance and cemetery in later generations, to Chu Fan's surprise, these are all free!
Not only that, the pension is also free, Hongwu years old, "the elderly over 80 years old give five buckets of rice, three catties of wine and five catties of meat every month, and the elderly over 90 years old are given a horse and ten catties of silk"; Before the Chenghua after Ming Taizu, successive emperors continued to increase this system, and Yingzong even lowered the pension age to seventy years old!
This is true in terms of people's livelihood, and the same is true for restricting land annexation, although there is a clause in the "Da Ming Law" that the gentry are exempted from forced labor, it is never stipulated that the gentry and scholars can not pay food! The gentry's refusal to pay grain was only written into the supplementary law during the Jiajing period, and there was a corresponding limit according to the grade - of course, Chu Fan also knew that this group of scholars must have begun to evade taxes before this, and the Jiajing Dynasty was just making up a legal procedure.
It is no wonder that the so-called "good scriptures have been read crooked by monks", as long as people govern the society, such changes cannot be avoided.
How to change the rule of man into a rule of law society, and completely put an end to such a phenomenon is a later story, Chu Fan's current task is to do a good job on paper first, and revise a book of "Tamluo Law" that can be implemented immediately.
Of course, good laws must be retained, and the place where Chu Fan moves his sword is the privilege of the gentry.
Since the gentry's tax exemption is a clause in the "Da Ming Law" exempting from conscription, then Chu Fan simply exempted all conscription except for military service!
He did so deliberately.
The ancient system of forced labor was really a big black hole of abuse of power! To be sure, the fact that people can work for nothing without spending money is too great a test of human nature, and few people can hold on to such temptations, especially those "parent officials" who cover the sky with one hand - since there are so many excuses for conscription and servitude, why not let them do some private work for themselves? Even if there is no private work to do, they can exchange their labor for some profits, which is the fundamental reason why the ancient forced labor became more and more onerous!
In fact, it is simple to solve this problem, that is, to change all the affairs that require the levy and conscription, such as building city walls, building water conservancy, escorting materials, etc., to paid services; The people paid for their labor, and the government paid them, and finally the free collection was turned into an outsourced business.
It is not enough to tighten the gap of exemption from forced labor, Chu Fan deliberately added an article in the "Tamluo Law" that "all land, no matter how big or small, must be taxed according to the law, and the gentry shall not be exempted", which put an end to the possibility of land transfer and taxation by the privileged class on paper.
Of course, Chu Fan knows that such a "one-size-fits-all" approach is also problematic - if everyone is the same and there is no actual benefit, who will risk their lives to help you fight the country?
To this end, Chu Fan threw out another bait, that is, the shares of the East India Company - in the Tamna Kingdom and even the soon-to-be-established Korean puppet government, various nobles and officials will receive a certain number of shares according to their respective ranks; There are two ways to obtain it, one is a reward and the other is the right to buy.
There are many advantages to this: first, the special rights are demonstrated. The so-called special * right is nothing more than what the general public does not have, and this right can bring great benefits. Why can Daming's scholars be superior? It is not just because as soon as you enter this door you can obtain the special right to be exempt from forced labor; And this privilege can be translated into great economic benefits—some or all of the tax money that should have been given to the imperial court is transferred to the scholars; Just imagine, if the reader didn't have this benefit, would so many people still flock to it?
The rarity and uniqueness of the special rights are as much as the economic benefits of the East India Company's shares - since the rough establishment of the Taniudao base, the East India Company has almost stopped raising shares, and in the future, Chu Fan will control the shares more strictly; And every first-year dividend is enough to make anyone go crazy with jealousy.
The second is the ability to economically tie these power holders, whether Ming or Korean, together through equity, which greatly increases the cost of their betrayal; Chu Fan believed that such a method was far more clever than taking his family members as hostages, after all, real money was the ultimate goal of most people.
The third is to be able to recoup a large amount of silver through the IPO. Most of the equity cast out this time will be the right to buy, and the reward will only account for a small part of it - although the East India Company is not short of silver, but in the future, several major projects, such as the construction of tobacco, sugarcane, pepper and other raw material planting bases, are all black holes to burn money, and it is the best policy to take precautions.
The last point, and the most crucial point, is that Chu Fan is ready to use the East India Company to reverse the concept that China has lasted for thousands of years, and he wants to build a country with business!
In the history of China, there have been several times when we have touched the door of capitalism, but for various reasons, we have missed it; At the end of the Song Dynasty and the end of the Ming Dynasty, the scale of handicraft workshops in the Jiangnan area in the two periods had surpassed that of Britain during the Industrial Revolution, but in the end it failed to complete the door.
On the surface, both of these were interrupted by foreign invasions, but a closer look reveals that the hierarchical concept of "Shinong, Industrialist, and Industrialist" played a major role in hindering this, in other words, capitalism could not have been born smoothly on the land of China without the invasion of the Mongols and Tatars.
Taking the salt merchants of the Ming and Qing dynasties as an example, whether it is financial resources or political influence, they can be described as unprecedented, but until the middle of the nineteenth century, none of the salt merchants in Yangzhou developed into a modern enterprise in the true sense, for no other reason, because business is a cheap industry!
The vast majority of salt merchants have a development trajectory like this: they earn silver by selling salt, buy land and provide education for their children when they have silver, and when their children gain fame, they continue to annex land, and eventually become large landowners and give up selling salt.
This was also the trajectory of many other successful industrialists at the time, and most of their profits were transferred to the land, so that industry and commerce themselves were always in a state of lack of accumulation, and eventually could not complete the industrial revolution of the British kind.
Chu Fan is now facing the best opportunity to change this concept - his core team is either Liaodong exiles who have experienced the destruction of their families, or murderous pirates in the East China Sea, or Korean exiles who have been stripped of their official positions, in short, they are not vested interests; Of course, their ideas will not be as rigid as those of vested interests, and the hierarchy of "Shinong, industrialist, and industrialist" is much more vague.
If they were to be tied to "industry and commerce" in the process of their transformation from the bottom of society to the privileged class, that is, to the East India Company, coupled with the strong suppression of land annexation, the status of "industry and commerce" would be greatly enhanced, and eventually they would become the guardians of the interests of "industry and commerce".
With the backing of such a class, it is possible for Chu Fan to wrestle with those invincible scholars of the Ming Dynasty in the future, win over the giant businessmen in the south of the Yangtze River, and let capitalism finally take deep roots in the land of the East.
This is the core of the innovation of Tamna Guoding! (To be continued.) )