Seeing this group of court officials who were obviously in a state of sluggishness, most likely wondering how many fat pigs there were in the world who were willing to be slaughtered by Mr. Gaoge, Gao Pragmatic felt a little helpless. It seems that if they don't show their interests first, they won't be able to listen to their subsequent disaster relief measures.
"Ahem!" Gao Pingshi cleared his throat, clapped his hands and said, "Everyone, everyone!"
Seeing that it was Mr. Gaoge who spoke, everyone finally recovered from their hysterical state, and their unfocused eyes looked at the butcher... er, the great Ming strategist.
"Everyone, I have been busy with wars in the past few years of the Ming Dynasty. Although the Ministry of Household Affairs has carried out some effective reforms in finance, which has greatly increased the annual income. However, I also know that this dynasty has maintained low official salaries since the founding of the People's Republic of China. In the system, many scholars studied hard and were promoted to official positions, but they could not even afford to hire a housekeeper.
What's more, there are people like Haigong Gangfeng, who has the honor of being the governor of heaven but his family is so poor that he can hardly eat meat. How can we not feel sad? Therefore, a few years ago, I sent a report to the Emperor to provide some salary for the officials of the world..."
As soon as he mentioned this matter, the officials attending the meeting, no matter where they came from, had to bow to express their gratitude. In fact, the salaries of officials in the Ming Dynasty were so low before. What Gao Pragmatic did that time really benefited everyone, and more importantly, the money he spent to increase their salaries was also obtained through various reforms. It does not increase the burden on the people much, which is especially rare.
In fact, many people can't help but have an idea in their minds: If Mr. Gaoge doesn't mess around from now on, this alone is worthy of a "Chinese correction"!
At this time, Gao Pragmatic waved his hand to stop everyone from singing praises, and continued: "Despite this, according to the calculations of the headquarters, the current salary of officials is actually still low, which is not conducive to the imperial court."
Eh? Is the low official salary detrimental to the court?
Everyone was a little startled after hearing what he said. Didn't the low official salaries reduce the court's expenses? Why was it not conducive to the court?
Gao Pragmatic seemed to know what they were thinking, and smiled slightly and said: "The low salary of officials certainly reduces the expenditure of the court, but officials also need to pay for food and clothing, recruit the shogunate, and hire people, so that they can truly carry out the government affairs of a place." It's manageable, isn't it? But what if he has no money?
Either you are tired of taking office, but you are not doing everything well; or you are neglecting government affairs and letting them rot without being able to do anything, causing the people to complain and the gentry to be dissatisfied; and the worst kind is Transformed into a giant rat, greedy for ink, bullying the court at the top, and bullying the people at the bottom, it can be said that the harm is endless. "
These words really touched everyone's heart, and they all agreed. Only Chen Yubi, who was the Minister of the Ministry of Personnel, was a little uneasy and said with a slight hesitation: "Could it be that Mr. Ge wanted to follow the example of Zhitian Yanglian or Zhitian Yanglian like he did in the Song Dynasty?" A similar move? If so, the headquarters would like to advise the cabinet minister to think twice - neither Qingli's New Deal nor Wang Anshi's reform have succeeded at this point."
Gao pragmatic understood what Chen Yubi meant, but he had never thought about the method of raising integrity in Zhitian. Of course, he also understood why Chen Yubi suddenly thought of Zhitian.
Throughout almost the entire feudal dynasty of China, officials received salaries in many forms, which can be roughly divided into four types: land, grain, physical goods, and coins.
In the pre-Qin period, salaries were basically based on physical goods and land. Later, it gradually developed into food and coins, but they were also linked to the fields. After all, China has always been a major agricultural country, and the topic of land cannot be avoided.
During the Northern Wei Dynasty, the imperial court stopped paying money and food to officials. Instead, it directly allocated a piece of land of corresponding size according to the official grade and let the officials collect rent by themselves. This is the origin of job fields.
During the Northern Wei Dynasty, Zhitian was used to pay wages. At that time, the imperial court was also lazy and was afraid of causing trouble to itself, so it became the most convenient way to pay wages by allocating a piece of land to collect rent for yourself. You can send it to yourself, and you can decide whether to send more or less. Of course, you will definitely not exceed the "market price" by too much, otherwise no one will be willing to be a tenant in your home.
However, with the gradual development of the economy, the situation has changed. The scope of job fields has become larger and larger. This is not paying wages. This is simply preparing for enfeoffment.
For example, there is a comment on this in "History of the Song Dynasty": "It has some land, and selects people and small envoys who are close to the people. Each member pays ten guans per month for tea and soup. Although there are vocational fields, it is less than ten guans per month. , are all supplemented, so we should enrich the benefits of raising integrity. We are afraid that the people will be sick, so we will appoint general judges and county magistrates to verify, remove the fields that cannot be cultivated, and damage the excessive quotas."
For this reason, the imperial court took back the job fields and paid corresponding salaries to the officials. By the time of the Song Dynasty, the economy was extremely developed, and a new problem arose, that is, corruption was too serious.
At the very beginning, Song Renzong raised this issue of corruption when he presided over the Qingli New Deal, hoping that the court could properly arrange job fields. Unfortunately, the Qingli New Deal failed in the end, so the burden of reform fell on Wang Anshitou.
Wang Anshi's head was filled with excitement, and he said that solving the corruption problem is very simple, that is, high salary to support integrity! As long as officials are paid high enough wages, they will certainly not be able to commit corruption. For this reason, Wang Anshi decided to distribute job fields to various officials as rewards in addition to salary.
He wants to use this to put an end to the corruption problem, but has the problem really been solved? How can it be!
I have to say that Wang Anshi's idea can only be described as naive - yes, Wang Anshi himself may have enough moral consciousness, but as long as the salary is in place, corruption is absolutely impossible. However, there are so many officials in the world, how many of them can you find with your level of consciousness? I'm afraid most are far from it.
There is no need to pay taxes on job fields, it is purely the officials' own income. As expected, local officials began to illegally occupy more job fields for various reasons, which turned job fields into a new tool for corruption.
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In fact, in addition to basic salary and job income, the income of officials in the Song Dynasty was very rich. For example, they have silk and satin subsidies, which are subsidies for buying clothes; tea and wine money, which is the cost of drinking tea and alcohol; cooking material money, which is the money reimbursed for food and drink; and fuel money, which is the money for lighting and heating the home. Subsidies; horse feed money, which is the cost of food and drink for your horses, etc.
But even so, it still cannot stop the hands of corrupt officials.
After the Song Dynasty, regardless of the Yuan Dynasty, what about the Ming Dynasty? What Zhu Yuanzhang did back then has been mentioned many times, so I'm too lazy to pull it out and whip the corpse again. Let's talk about Zhang Juzheng's method in original history.
Zhang Juzheng's most famous financial reform in later generations is the "One Whip Method", although this thing was not his first - the first was Gui E; nor was he even the first to start vigorously promoting it - the first strong promoter For high arch. But in any case, later generations will attribute this credit to Zhang Juzheng.
Of course, this algorithm is not completely unreasonable, because after Gui E proposed it, it was too controversial, and the court was in turmoil. The thunder was loud and the rain was small; Gao Gong pushed forward forcefully, but he made steady steps, mainly promoting prosperity in Jiangnan. It did not spread across the country, and his time in power was too short.
In this comparison, Zhang Juzheng was the first to promote a whipping method nationwide, and he has been doing it for many years. It is not a big problem to credit this achievement to him, but we should not forget Gui E and Gao Gong. That would be too unfair. .
However, in addition to the imbalance of regional development mentioned many times in this book, which has caused poor areas to suffer greatly, the unified implementation of a whipping method across the country also has a very serious problem, that is, fire consumption.
To put it simply, the one-whip method is to change all the previous physical taxes into cash, and only require a whole ingot of silver. So here comes the question, if everyone collects money, where will there be so much money?
For this reason, local governments have to find ways. Copper coins and physical objects can be exchanged for silver, but they are often collected in broken silver. These can be used to pay taxes, and the government must take these broken silver to melt into ingots of silver.
However, the process of melting silver involves losses. In other words, one tael of broken silver will definitely not melt into one tael of whole silver. For this reason, the government must charge a fire fee, which is the price difference. In the end, this fire consumption became the main income of local officials.
Local officials who are relatively more conscientious will only charge two or three taels of fire expenses for one tael of silver, but there are also those unscrupulous people who will charge half a tael of fire expenses for one tael of silver, which is simply life-threatening.
Zhang Juzheng also turned a blind eye to this point. Why? Because he, or rather the court, did not want to provide this money. Since the local officials had their own ways to make money, that was not bad, but it saved the court from spending more money to maintain integrity. As for who was unlucky in the end, Zhang Juzheng couldn't care less, or he couldn't find a way to get the best of both worlds, so he had to "suffer the common people."
After the fall of the Ming Dynasty, the Tatar Qing Dynasty basically followed the practice of fire consumption, allowing local officials to make a solid fortune for a period of time. However, in the last years of Kang Mazi, the corruption situation became very serious again. It was only seventy or eighty years ago, and the Qing Dynasty also began to decay.
In order to change the decadent situation, Yongzheng made new reforms in the area of Huohuo. This requires a lot of courage, because this reform touches the interests of all local officials in the world.
However, Yongzheng made up his mind and asked officials from various places to hand over all the firepower to the court. In other words, no matter how much fire consumption you collect for one tael of silver, it will all be paid as taxes. This is the famous "fire consumption returned to the public".
However, wouldn't the local officials lose a lot of money? Of course they would not agree. For this reason, Yongzheng had to make a compromise, so he suddenly came up with the idea of raising honest silver.
This method is actually a strange one, because Yanglianyin is essentially a collection of fire expenses. Generally, different levels of Yanglianyin are distributed according to the wealth of different regions. And somehow, the salary is really high, usually more than ten times the salary, and the highest can even be a hundred times.
For example, in the late Qing Dynasty, Taiwan Governor Liu Mingchuan had an annual salary of only 155 taels, but Yanglianyin received more than 10,000 taels. This shows how ridiculously high the amount of Yang Lian Yin is.
Why is Yanglianyin so high? This matter is a bit complicated, and due to space limitations, I won’t go into details here. In a word, the amount of yanglianyin is actually proportional to the amount of firehose turned over. Therefore, officials from various places work even harder to hand over firehose for their own yanglianyin - being able to hand over means that they create more firehose. ah.
Of course, what is more interesting in the Qing Dynasty is that the money to raise integrity belongs only to local officials, not to officials in the capital. But it doesn’t matter, Beijing officials have their own ideas - I am a central official, how can local officials not fawn over me? Hence the so-called "charcoal respect" and "ice respect".
From this, a vicious circle is formed: when the fire consumption is high, the local officials have more money to raise money, so they can send more ice and charcoal to the officials in the capital; when the officials in the capital get the benefits, they will Will acquiesce to local officials charging higher fire costs.
As for who is unlucky, it’s not the officials anyway, so it can be anyone.
Officials' salaries are too low and seriously do not match their social status. Do they need high salaries to maintain integrity? Perhaps yes, because this mismatch will stimulate the greed of human nature, making officials inevitably find ways to engage in power rent-seeking.
However, although it is not impossible to support integrity, it certainly cannot be maintained in this way. At least the same group of officials cannot control the amount of money to support integrity, because this is not fundamentally different from paying their own wages. Especially when the source of this money is people's taxes, the problem is even more serious, which will inevitably lead to severe exploitation of ordinary people.
From this, Gao Pragmatic came up with a new method: Don't you like exploitation? Okay, I'll let you in quietly, but the target of this exploitation is not ordinary people, but wealthy businessmen and local gentry.
"Don't worry, Mr. Otsuka, that's not what I mean." Gao pragmatically said, looking around at everyone, and announced his plan: "What I mean is that from now on, the silver earned by the 'three-class foreign nobles' will be distributed throughout the country." , will be pooled to set up a fund, 30% of which will be used as a bank to support officials.
The amount of this money for raising integrity will be audited at the end of each year, and then all distributed to officials across the country, regardless of Beijing officials or foreign officials, according to grade and position around February of the following year. "
As soon as this statement came out, everyone couldn't sit still, and subconsciously began to wonder how big the money was, and how much money they could get each year based on their rank. But after thinking about it, I discovered one of the key points: since it is a fixed 30% ratio, in the final analysis, if you want more money, you need the whole country to be willing to spend money to obtain this "third-class foreign title" as the old man in the high cabinet calls it. There are enough people.
However, how can we make such a big fat pig... no, how can we have more knights, wise men, and good gentlemen like this?
Gao pragmatic looked at everyone in front of him and smiled without saying a word.
One hundred thousand, thirty thousand, ten thousand, you can't get such large sums from ordinary people. You can only mobilize wealthy businessmen and local powerful people.
Humph, the Ming Dynasty had poor people and rich people, and there were a lot of rich people in the local areas. If you didn't squeeze them, then they would just bury their money as heirlooms, which would be of no use to the national economy...
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ps: Sorry, it may be that I was seriously sleep deprived in the past few days. I was a little sleepy after eating dinner last night. I originally planned to take a nap, but ended up falling asleep. I woke up at four o'clock in the morning and saw that something bad had happened, so I quickly added this chapter... This chapter counts as yesterday, and tonight's chapter counts separately.
