Chapter 464 Capital Merger
Zhu Jingyuan arranged work for Lin Zexu and Zheng Xingyang, and asked them to further investigate the local situation in Suzhou.
Then Zhu Jingyuan sat down at his desk and began to think about a question again.
If the marriage of Liu Yudong and Songjiang Wang Baoqing in Suzhou this time really does not violate the law at all, the dowry and dowry worth tens of thousands of gold bills from the two families are really just the basis for the future life of the couple.
So what should you think about this?
There may be some tax evasion through dowries and dowries, but there will certainly be large dowries and dowries.
The marriage between rich and noble families and the combination of private capital are completely logical things.
Even if there is no external interference at all, something will happen naturally.
The Second Industrial Revolution was originally the era of monopoly capitalism.
What's more, in recent years, the Ming court has begun to vigorously promote the construction of government-owned manufacturers.
Private capital feels the dual pressure of the royal family and the imperial court, and will definitely accelerate the speed of union between them.
In a completely free market, private capital may continue to merge and move towards the form of monopoly capitalism.
Like land annexation in the agrarian era, it cannot be completely avoided.
The process of capital moving towards monopoly can be regarded as a process of "capital merger" in a way.
And the excessive annexation of land was the most important reason for the collapse of traditional dynasties.
On the one hand, it reduces the fault tolerance rate of dynastic governance schemes.
There are fewer and fewer self-sufficient yeoman farmers, and the vast majority of peasants have become tenant farmers, whose ability to resist natural and man-made disasters is obviously lower than that of yeoman farmers.
The slightest deviation in the imperial court's policy could have forced the tenant farmers on the poverty line.
On the one hand, it reduced the dominance of dynastic rulers.
There are more and more large local landlords, who are often also scholars, and the members of such families are often the source of fresh blood for the traditional dynastic bureaucracy.
When the imperial court proposes any policy that harms the interests of their own families, the bureaucrats themselves will instinctively find ways to delay or even confront them.
Under such internal and external erosion, once a large-scale natural disaster broke out, the imperial court had no strength to rescue, and the tenant farmers were also forced to the brink of life and death.
Thus the peasant revolt war broke out in the last years of the dynasty.
The results of capital annexation in the industrial age are very similar to the effects of land annexation in the agricultural era.
It would also reduce the margin for error in imperial court policy.
An industry is monopolized by one or a handful of large corporations, small and medium-sized enterprises may even disappear altogether, and all become workers who are proletarian in nature.
Workers have no means of production, no valuable assets, and may even be completely negative assets, and their ability to resist risks will of course be very low.
At the same time, the annexation of capital would also reduce the ruling power of the imperial court.
The small "imperial court" must not be able to control monopoly capital, and the favorite imperial court of monopoly capital is the "night watchman", and it is enough to hope that the imperial court will be a pure "security guard".
The problems in these two areas continue to worsen, and in the event of large-scale natural and man-made disasters, the workers will be pushed to the death line, and they will have to rebel and overthrow this useless court.
However, after the industrial age, social productivity increased significantly compared with the agricultural era.
The ability of the whole society to resist natural and man-made disasters has also increased substantially.
Even in times of large-scale economic crisis, the whole society has abundant goods.
After all, the immediate response to the economic crisis is "overproduction", but the lack of liquidity, not the lack of goods.
As long as the bourgeoisie unites and distributes a certain amount of relief to the unemployed workers through the institutions they control, so that the unemployed workers do not starve to death, the whole country and the court will not collapse completely.
The United States of the Great Depression is a very typical example of the complete control of the imperial court by the bourgeoisie.
At that time, although there was massive unemployment in the United States, the U.S. government had enough resources for relief.
In addition, the New World is already rich in products, and there will basically be no direct starvation of people.
So even in the United States during the Great Depression, there was no proletarian revolution.
But the premise of all this is that there is abundance of goods, and it is the bourgeoisie that replaces the traditional aristocracy and really controls the state apparatus.
After independence in the United States, there was no traditional aristocracy, and the whole country was a bourgeois regime from the beginning.
However, the Tessie countries were very different, and the traditional aristocracy had existed in society for a long time.
The bourgeoisie of the Taixi countries basically gradually seized the control of the traditional aristocracy over the imperial court in the era of the second industrial revolution, while their own power expanded rapidly.
In the case of Britain specifically, this process began in the late nineteenth century and was not fully completed until the end of the Second World War.
World War I was a turning point in the exchange of strength between the two sides.
Before the First World War, the power of kings and nobles still exceeded the power of capital.
After World War I, it was the other way around.
Beginning in 1894, under the impetus of the British House of Commons, the proportion of inheritance tax continued to rise.
From 8 percent to 65 percent during World War II!
The traditional aristocracy was usually not good at management and relied mainly on land and estates for profit.
These lands and estates are in turn the most important legacies.
If an old nobleman has 10,000 acres of land, when he passes it on to his son, he has to pay an inheritance tax of 6,500 acres of land.
The bourgeoisie did not allow the traditional aristocracy to sit on the land and the estates and die drunk.
Coupled with the simultaneous increase in property taxes, the British bourgeoisie continued to extract money from the hands of the traditional aristocracy for half a century, and finally killed most of the nobles.
Eventually, the British royal family began to marry commoners, because the aristocracy completely lost its power.
The current situation of the Ming Dynasty is that the royal family and aristocracy still control the country.
Most of the aristocracy, including the royal family, was also the bourgeoisie, and the pure bourgeoisie was very weak.
At the same time, Daming also does not charge inheritance tax at all.
Because this is not only completely contrary to the traditional culture of the East, but also completely unacceptable to the aristocracy who still holds the ruling power.
Not only does Daming not charge inheritance tax, but also no income tax at all on property gifts between parents and children.
Only when it comes to the change of ownership of fixed assets, as well as the change of name of bond assets such as securities and equity, it is necessary to pay a small amount of stamp duty and deed tax at the time of going through the procedures.
Before the Second Industrial Revolution, before the rapid expansion of merchants' capital, the impact of these systems was actually not great.
But now things are starting to change.
Zhu Jingyuan felt that the policy of not collecting inheritance tax and exempting property gifts between immediate family members was a growing tax loophole in the era of rapid expansion of capital power.
However, anyone who wants to collect taxes on these two situations is absolutely unrefutable to the world.
Do I have to pay taxes on my inheritance? Is there any heavenly reason!
When parents give money to their children for expenses, or buy a house for their children to get married, do they also have to pay taxes?
Do children still have to pay taxes when they give gifts to their parents, or give money to spend, or buy facilities for the elderly?
The traditional Ming people simply could not imagine and find it difficult to accept this situation.
The children of the royal family and nobles who are directly affected by the specific are certainly unacceptable.
Many people are likely to take it for granted that the emperor should pay taxes when he succeeds to the throne.
When the Emperor Taishang transferred the ownership of the imperial consortium and the imperial village to the next emperor, did he also have to pay taxes to the imperial court?
Zhu Jingyuan kept thinking in his heart, what should I do about this matter? When should it be done?
In the next few days, the secretaries sent by Zhu Jingyuan to other regions also returned one after another.
One report after another was sent to Zhu Jingyuan.
Zhu Jingyuan also brought his own thoughts and listened carefully to and read these reports.
Local clan organizations are very common in Jianghuai province.
The vast majority of families that have lived in a place for a long time will form a clan organization maintained by blood relations.
It is also very common for someone in a clan to do business at the same time, someone to test their fame, and someone to go to sea.
At the same time, it is also very common for some people to become officials in other places, and it is also very common for their children to become grassroots officials in the local yamen.
However, what Zhu Jingyuan was most worried about was that a clan completely controlled a place, but he basically didn't see it.
In most places, there is a situation where a family has people in all aspects, and it is far less than a family controlling a township, county, or district.
Even, in many places, there are some clans that are not very good with each other, and there are conflicts in business or industry.
On this morning, Zhu Jingyuan summoned Lin Zexu and the main secretary and expressed some of his doubts:
"According to the information obtained from your investigation, in the prefectures and counties under our Daming Jianghuai Province, there is basically no large-scale clan force that covers the sky with one hand.
"Of course, this can be regarded as a good thing, which shows that the local area is relatively stable, and there are fewer things like local tyrants and bullies.
"But I wonder why? Why this is the case. ”
Zhu Jingyuan did not question someone, but put on a discussion posture as usual.
The scene immediately began to discuss.
Soon after, Lin Zexu himself tried to analyze:
"Your Highness, the students think that there are basically no local bully clan forces in the Jianghuai region, probably because most of the Jianghuai Province is too rich."
Zhu Jingyuan was slightly stunned:
"Because you're too rich?"
Lin Zexu nodded and continued to explain his thoughts:
"Taking our Lin family in Fujian Province as an example, our family has set aside a sum of money to provide for the family's children to go to school.
"At the same time, it provides potential young people to go to college and even take the job exam.
"Our family has also invested in shipbuilding, aircraft, automobiles, tractors and related industries.
The joint also took out an extra part of the money to invest in the operation and development of farms in East Mozhou, a big food country, and operate a rayon textile factory.
"Thanks to His Highness, in the new industry promoted by His Highness, our Lin family has really made a lot of money over the years.
"But our kind of family is not special at all in the current Daming territory.
"Including the Jianghuai region, plus Shandong in the north, Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangdong in the south, there are many families that operate in various aspects and industries.
In other words, there are people in everyone's family who have seen the world, and they know how to go to court when they suffer losses.
"Those who refuse to accept the punishment may even fight the lawsuit all the way to the Dali Temple in Beijing.
"Everyone follows the rules, and there is no direct personal threat, and there is no way to kill the enemy, and there is no way to cover the sky on the ground.
"If anyone is undisciplined, everyone has a way to poke it out, and the court will naturally punish the crime according to the law.
"Most families can't overwhelm all their fellow villagers, and there are complex relationships of competition and cooperation everywhere.
"On the contrary, in a relatively remote place, there is a situation where it is suspected that a local family is covering the sky with one hand."
Zhu Jingyuan couldn't help but smile and nod when he heard this.
Although Lin Zexu was very modest in his mouth, the Lin family in Fujian is definitely not everywhere.
But as he said, there are all kinds of industries involved, and at the same time keep up with the latest scientific and technological developments, there are indeed many families in the southeast of the Ming Dynasty.
However, if the scale of the family itself is larger, the scale of the industry it operates will of course be larger, and if the family is small, the scale of the industry it operates will be smaller.
Betting in multiple places is originally a habitual practice of traditional clans in Shenzhou.
The most important thing is that with the continuation of this multi-party operation, with continuous learning and exploration, these families have shifted from traditional local clans to industrial and commercial asset families.
Especially Lin Zexu's sentence, everyone has seen the world, and they will not back down when they encounter intimidation and coercion.
Everyone is not afraid of taking the lawsuit to Dali Temple.
In particular, Jianghuai Province was originally Nanzhili, and the current provincial capital is also the nominal Ming Nanjing.
I don't know what stage fright is
Of course, the most critical issue is that the Ming Dynasty is strong enough, providing a relatively fair and strict competition platform.
If anyone doesn't follow the rules and wants to rely on violence and criminal means to attack other families, the other party can directly ask the court to rectify it, which is a real devastating blow.
In other words, under the guidance and management of the imperial court, after more than 100 years of development, these richest places in the Ming Dynasty have formed a relatively stable and reasonable logic of industrial and commercial competition.
On the contrary, it is in relatively remote places, where the news is not smooth, and where education is relatively backward, there will be evil snakes.
But the problem remains.
The rules established by Emperor Shizu have many advanced parts, but there are also more compromises.
Laws enacted in the pre-industrial era must of course be adapted to the current situation of the pre-industrial era.
Now is the second industrial revolution, the era of the real formation of large-scale machine production, the era of capital mergers and monopolies.
Before the rules were perfected, the clever businessmen were already frantically exploiting loopholes.
So Zhu Jingyuan smiled and nodded and said:
"What Mr. Lin said makes sense, the richer the area, the more orderly the place, and the place where the imperial court is strong, the less likely it is to produce local underworld forces.
"I am very pleased with this, and I will adjust the scope of investigation and rectification of the forces of the underworld family, and take the relatively remote and impoverished mountainous areas as the main target.
"But at the same time, in relatively wealthy areas, it is very common for local clans to join forces with each other to run on competitors and evade taxes by various means.
"I've read your reports and found a similar situation in almost everywhere, with the richest Suzhou Mansion being the most typical.
"Next, we will start the investigation with the 'family affairs of Liu Yudong and Wang Baoqing'.
"Find out how the dowry of this 10,000 gold bills was raised, and whose account it will end up into."
(End of chapter)