"Oh? What exactly are the unexpected benefits? Anthony was distracted by Roland's new topic, and stopped asking about "Liszt Keynes".

Roland smiled mysteriously, "Well...... I won't talk about it yet, but you'll know when you see it with your own eyes. ”

After a five-hour journey, the magic train finally sounded the whistle as it entered the station, and the end of the trip, "Red Stone Bridge Farm", arrived.

Anthony followed Roland out of the car with a lot of questions and expectations, and what he saw was a vast fertile field. The paddy field has been harvested, and only the endless golden rice stubble is left in the field, and the straw stacks are neatly arranged on the edge of the ridge. Carrying baskets woven from rice straw, children laugh and chase barefoot in the harvested rice fields, sometimes bending down to pick up the ears of rice scattered in the fields.

Enjoying the scenery of the fields along the way, Roland and Anthony took the ox cart sent by the commune management committee to meet the tax police to the Red Rock Bridge Commune. Anthony was refreshed by the local customs, and what surprised him even more was that the whole process of collecting public grain went very smoothly, and there was no expected resistance at all, let alone violent resistance to taxes.

The chief of the commune is a respected old man whose family is the number one in the local area, and the old man is the contemporary patriarch of the family, and his prestige in the township is not to mention.

Less than half a year after the village priest, druid, and sheriff were sent to Redstone Bridge Commune, they had already won the trust of the villagers with their professional expertise, the former being more prestigious among women, children, and the elderly, and the latter being more loved by the young men. It is not difficult to understand that the religious, educational, and medical services provided by priests and druids mainly benefited women, children, and the elderly, while the sheriff was also the commander of the commune's militia company.

With these four commune cadres coming forward, they can naturally calm the scene, which Diao people dare to be disrespectful to the tax police, and there is no need for the tax police to enforce the law by themselves, and the commune leaders are so frightened that the other party quickly shrinks his head and shuts up, and he doesn't dare to let a fart go.

The tax police captain, following Roland's instructions, did not reveal the identity of His Royal Highness the prince to the locals. With his clever make-up and uniform borrowed from the tax police, Roland was treated by the locals as an ordinary tax policeman and did not attract much attention. However, Anthony was dressed in a small style in the city, which attracted a lot of curious eyes.

Anthony came from a family of imperial tax collectors, and the experience of knocking on doors to collect grain was not pleasant for him, but this time he accompanied Roland to Redstone Bridge Farm, and he saw an unusual way of collecting taxes.

The tax police did not need to go door-to-door to collect grain, but followed the commune cadres to the collective warehouse of the farm, opened the warehouse door one by one, and moved out the scales, where the warehouses full of hoarded grain were placed, and the strong men in the village helped to move out and load the scales, and the tax police only needed to verify the data of the grain to be collected, and they did not have to worry about anything else.

The commune's oxen, horses, and mules marched into battle, hauling carts full of sacks of grain to the train station, and the convoys almost clogged up the country roads.

Seeing this busy and orderly scene, Anthony did not need to explain to Roland to realize why the collection of grain in the village commune would be so efficient, far from the extremely high cost of taxation as in other places.

This was mainly due to the reform of rural governance implemented by Roland, which organized the originally self-sufficient yeoman farmers into village communes, and the scattered cultivated land of each family into collective farms, and the government taxed the collective institution of the commune, rather than the individual peasant households, and the public grain payable was taken from the collective warehouse, so that the individual peasant households did not have an excessive sense of deprivation and resistance, so that the taxation could be carried out smoothly. In addition, the Kolas government's 50 percent reduction in agricultural taxes was also an important factor in motivating farmers to pay public grain.

"Farmers may be cunning and selfish as you say, but farmers also have a simple and kind side, and gratitude is the most basic moral code of the local society."

In the era of the imperial provinces, the peasants of the Far East were oppressed mentally and materially, and their lives were extremely miserable, and of course they had to find ways to avoid the tax burden, and in the eyes of you, the imperial tax collector, the peasants seemed cunning and selfish; However, after the Kolas government came to power, it successively introduced a variety of policies to benefit the people, and through the press and magazines widely publicized it into the hearts of the people, the facts of the increase in crop production and harvest proved that the policy of benefiting the people was not a dead letter, and the peasants really felt that the present life was far more comfortable and prosperous than during the reign of the empire, so they actively paid the public grain with a grateful heart, and supported the new government that brought them a better life with practical actions. ”

Roland stood in front of the granary, looking at the busy crowd and sighed: "Whether it is a farmer or a city person, it is based on the changes in their own living conditions to evaluate the good and bad of the ruler, this scale may not always be fair, but the rise and fall of the regime throughout the ages, the change of dynasties are determined by this, this is the power of the people's back, in order to win the hearts of the people, politicians must not only continue to increase the total amount of social wealth, but also carefully distribute wealth among different social groups, and constantly adjust the balance of interests, it is more difficult to talk in detail than walking a tightrope." ”

Anthony shrugged, unable to tell whether he was sympathetic or gloating, "It's a good thing I gave up early and didn't have to be so busy all day like you." ”

Roland glanced at him and said with a smile: "We are the only two idlers here, in order to avoid being too conspicuous, we always have to find something to do, do you want to help carry the grain and carry the sack, or follow me to check the account books of the commune." ”

Anthony rolled his eyes angrily, "Young Master Ben is a financial and accounting expert from a professional class, so you still need to ask which one to choose!" ”

Roland asks for the ledger from the resident pastor who works part-time as a commune. Anthony flipped through it and immediately found three sets of statistic statistics. The grain harvested from the farms was stored in warehouses, from which the Commune Management Committee first allocated three public expenditures:

First, the agricultural tax (field tax) is paid at a rate of 20% of the total output.

Second, a portion of the grain was sold at the state purchase price to repay the loans and interest that the Peasant Development Bank had provided to the Commune the years before—including the rent for the 100 ploughing horses.

Third, a part of the proceeds from the sale of grain is set aside as a public service fund for the purchase of seeds, the repair of bridges and roads, the maintenance of public service facilities such as village offices, warehouses, mills, reservoirs, and schools, and the payment of wages to agricultural workers.

The rest of the grain is distributed according to the shares of each family, which is actually a kind of dividend in kind. The surplus grain is still stored in the collective warehouse, unified custody can reduce the cost of storage, if you need to take your own grain, go to the management committee to do a record can be withdrawn, the management committee will be based on the amount of accounting. The grain received by the members can be used for their own use, or they can be sold to the state for cash at the unified purchase price.