Chapter 196 The economic base determines the superstructure
Releasing water is also a science.
He Xi is obviously not very smart in this field of study.
In other words, Ming businessmen are all monkeys and monkeys. There was a slight disturbance in the market and there was an immediate reaction.
They may lack certain financial knowledge, but it does not mean that these people are stupid. In particular, many of these people were supported by He Xi and were inextricably related to He Xi's faction and even the entire court.
In this case, it would be difficult for He Xi to hide many of his actions from them.
Even though many people agree with He Xi in terms of political stance, they do not intend to go against He Xi. But the reaction is in action, instinctively protecting one's own property. As a result, He Ximou discovered that his secret issuance of money would not only widen the gap between the rich and the poor, but would even damage the credibility of the court and make certain people's financial resources stronger.
The reason for this is also what He Xi said himself.
He Xi has put a lot of effort into business taxation.
Customs duties, corporate business tax, combined various consumption taxes. This has led to the current fiscal revenue of more than 10 million yuan. He Xi dare not say that his taxation is completely reasonable. After all, it takes wisdom to determine the appropriate economic benefits.
However, He Xi knew that it was impossible to make up for the gap in military spending through tax increases. Additional means must be used.
The problem is to get enough money from these factory owners or businessmen. It's not as simple as it was for the yeoman.
There is a group of people behind these people. After all, big merchants have much more manpower and material resources than farmers. Likewise, merchants were more flexible than landowners. Landowners were able to pass the burden on to their tenants when faced with forced taxation by the court.
And how could these people not know about passing on?
Although the Beijing court has millions of soldiers, in this matter, force can only be used as a background and cannot be used lightly. If you move, the gains outweigh the losses.
so what should I do now?
At this moment, He Xi has to admit that the economic base determines the superstructure.
Facing the main body of farmers, a feudal dynasty is very suitable, even appropriate. Similarly, any rational emperor will know that the foundation of the dynasty lies in the farmers and the people at the bottom, so it maintains the lives of the people at the bottom. Suppressing the intermediate environment is inevitable.
The one who can do this is a wise king.
The capitalist system, big businessmen, and big factory owners were nothing more than one of countless intermediate links in the view of the feudal regime. And it is the most unstable. Naturally, they are under pressure.
The emperor, or the royal family, cannot manage such a large empire alone. He must have a helper. This helper is also selected through various selections, including military nobles, relatives, powerful families, scholar-bureaucrats, and finally the current civil servants and bureaucrats.
This is also the current political structure of the Ming Dynasty, which poses the least threat to the imperial power and allows the imperial power to rule in the most ideal state. However, all elements in the world are changing, and nothing is eternal. These scholar-officials and bureaucrats became the emperor's biggest opponents.
It's just that these bureaucrats themselves obeyed the imperial ruling ideology, and naturally suppressed the rise of other forces in various aspects.
This may be another reason why the industrial revolution did not occur in ancient China.
But now things have changed.
When the dynasty's tax base was built on factories, industry and commerce. The original method of tax collection in the feudal dynasty was no longer feasible. Something has to change.
If there hadn't been this war, there might have been gradual changes. But He Xi knew that the cost of the war to pacify the world was an astronomical figure, and He Xi expected it to be at least 100 million yuan. It seems like a lot, but in fact it is not much. It is nothing more than five years of taxes from Beijing. If it takes over the world, it will only be there in two or three years.
In He Xi's view, this is just the bottom line.
If funds are raised for the war, it cannot be so small. Three hundred million yuan is probably an appropriate number.
Can't you get such a number out from below? In He Xi's opinion, it can be taken out. Originally, He Xi wanted to use the method of printing money to get this money. He basically calculated it, and now the production
The strength and production scale, as well as the banknote circulation scope under Nanjing's jurisdiction, can afford such an over-issuance.
After all, it wasn’t like there wasn’t before. It's just that the number is too big. It will cause panic.
After all, the market has emotions. If pure calculation can replace market emotions, then economics can only retain the mathematical part.
So how do you get so much money? Even if bonds are issued, people must buy them.
The best way is to let the people below pay the taxes voluntarily.
It sounds ridiculous, but this is the reality He Xi faces.
Without him, many economic crimes these days are not crimes. At the beginning, He Xi wanted to use accounting to ensure tax collection. But as time went by and the economy became more prosperous, even if Shuntian Prefecture had more than ten thousand officials, if these officials were asked to check one by one, these people did not have to do anything else. The accounts in their hands alone would be enough for them to check until the end of the world.
Moreover, if the tax standards are set rigidly, most of the enterprises below will die, and it will become a carnival for a small number of enterprises with tax privileges. If the tax standards are set very detailed, the court does not have enough manpower and material resources.
After all, in an agricultural society, scattered agricultural production areas and local farmers cannot unite to resist a powerful imperial court. The imperial court could use coercive methods to requisition materials and production surpluses from various places. There is no need to explain anything to the people. Read the book
The only way the people can resist is to revolt.
So this is how the law of the dynasty cycle comes about. The upper level squeezes without limit, and the lower level has no other possibility of dialogue. They can only use such decisive means to drag the upper level to hell together, and then open up a new dynasty on the ruins, and start another round.
But things are different in industrial society.
The advanced productive forces of agricultural society lie in farmland and among farmers. The advanced productive forces of industrial society are in factories. It is impossible to continue dividing the factory down to each worker. The productivity of a single worker cannot represent advanced productivity. The new production model of the factory is the advanced productive force.
If the imperial court wants to obtain wealth or taxes from advanced productive forces, what it has to face is not scattered and weak peasants, but capitalists and factory owners. Theirs are all powerful.
This model is closer to the manor economy of aristocratic families in the Eastern Jin and Southern and Northern Dynasties.
Of course, what we are talking about here is the relationship between the court and them, and the manor economy is still very different from that of a factory. But the Sima family's court couldn't stand up to aristocratic families from all over the world, and the same problem also happened to the Beijing court.
If coercion doesn't work, we can only use more artistic methods to get these people to hand over their money voluntarily.
But there is a problem here, and that is the issue of legality.
Why is ideology the most important?
Humans are social animals, so they must have rules. Without rules, it is the law of the jungle, whoever is stronger is justified. If a set of rules is to be followed by others, it must have "reason." And this reason is ideology.
He Xi had always avoided ideology, and thus the discussion about the emperor in Confucianism, because he did not want to irritate the old guard of Confucianism. At the same time, he didn't want to irritate Zhu Xiongying.
Because Zhu Xiongying's imperial power comes from Confucian interpretation of the emperor.
These four words, "Revere Heaven and Fazu," are the source of the emperor's power.
Heaven is the destiny. It shows that the emperor inherits the destiny from heaven and is the son of heaven, which is similar to the Japanese saying about the gods in the world. Fazu, this also means that the world is the world of ancestors and sects. The emperor's power also comes from his own blood.
This world belongs to our ancestors.
This explains the two sources of the emperor's power, and also gives the sources used by Confucianism to limit the emperor's power. The interpretation of heaven's will is the power of Confucianism, and the interpretation of ancestral system is also the power of Confucianism. This creates a check and balance of power.
Among them, merchants never had a role.
Now the emperor wants merchants, factory owners and capitalists to pay extra money? There has to be an explanation.
Just like now, the dispute between North and South is a battle between orthodoxy. But businessmen don’t care about orthodoxy. In the eyes of many people, it is nothing more than two brothers fighting over the family.
Property, you are fighting for our property and making us bankrupt? What's the point?
