Chapter 193 Those who have no property have no perseverance
If ordinary good people are mismanaged by the government and are forced to stage a tax revolt,
Even if Fang Yizhi used force and killed a group of people and successfully suppressed them, his official career would probably be seriously affected.
Fortunately, during Shen Shuren's absence, those who caused trouble were only Zhang Xianzhong's old troops who had surrendered. These people had bad deeds to begin with, so as long as they could be exterminated, Shen Shuren could suppress them and not report them to the court. They should regard it as a family scandal that should not be made public.
However, summarizing experience and drawing lessons must still be done with caution. Shen Shuren really paid attention to this matter, so he reviewed it carefully with Fang Yizhi.
Fang Yizhi was also very helpless: "Last month, the reason why these people caused trouble was because they thought that the rent collection ratio for the official villages where refugees were resettled in Huguang was too high.
From Wuchang Prefecture to Changsha Prefecture, the land is granted by the government and resettled for the refugees to cultivate on their own. The land is divided 50-50 and 50% of the rent is collected for several years. When the war is not tense and there is no shortage of military rations, taxes will naturally be reduced.
If you are a self-cultivated farmer who has owned land locally before, you naturally do not need to pay such a high amount. You only need to pay the normal national tax plus the three rates fixed by the court.
In addition, for those who need to plant new high-yielding crops such as corn and potatoes, regardless of whether they obtain seeds from the government, they will need to pay 46% plus 10% of the rent, and the government will get 60% - considering the large output of these crops, in fact, it is given to farmers.
Keeping 40% will protect them from other exploitation, and they can produce with peace of mind, and they can have food and clothing. There is no way to help them in the autumn of national crisis, which will cost a lot of money."
Chen Shuren agrees with the data mentioned by Fang Yizhi.
The regular taxes of the Ming Dynasty were indeed not high. If the three rates were added, the people would definitely be able to bear it if there were no additional assessments and there was no such thing as "the rich and powerful don't pay taxes, and the assessment is doubled for those without privileges"
.
After all, we have to fight a war. If we don't pay so much, where will the military rations come from? As long as production can be done well, there will be no problem.
After all, the three prefectures in Changsha, Changde, and Hengzhou had just been massacred by Zhang Xianzhong this year, and their population had been reduced by at least half, leaving unclaimed land for government distribution.
At least there are no landlords to exploit these refugees who are allocated fields. The individual farmers directly pay the rent to the government, and there is no middleman to make the difference.
Therefore, after Chen Shuren went through these data, he could not figure it out for the time being: "Just this ratio of taxes and rents can directly force the resettled refugees to rebel? This is incredible, the government has provided them with some
Farm tools allow them to produce as quickly as possible. Could it be that when they were ordinary people, the rent they had to bear would be significantly less than this?"
Fang Yizhi sighed, with an expression like "Sure enough, you were also kept in the dark": "So, the problem lies here - later after pacifying the Changsha bandits, I made many inquiries to learn more about their early years in Shaanxi
, only then can we know the people’s sentiments and circumstances in Henan.
In Shaanxi and Henan, the national taxes and salaries are certainly high, and because there are more refugees and fewer people are left behind, they will be taxed even more harshly. Therefore, in Shaanxi, a poor peasant has to be handed over to the court and the government.
Partly, there will only be more than what we have here.
But! In Shaanxi, since the Tianqi period, or even as early as the end of Wanli, if poor farmers rented land from landlords, the rent they paid to the landlords was already lower than in the south! In the south, under normal circumstances,
, the biggest burden on the people is actually the part that the landless peasants give to the landlords, and the part that goes to the court and the government should be the small part."
Chen Shuren was shocked: "How is it possible? Could it be that the landlords in Shaanxi have good conscience and can charge so much less rent? Then these people are used to seeing 'benevolent landlords' in Shaanxi, but they can't stand it when they arrive in Huguang?!"
Chen Shuren found it very unbelievable. This statement was definitely beyond his intuition.
Fang Yizhi shook his head: "Of course it's not about 'kindness'. There are so many benevolent landlords and tyrants in the world. The reason is that since the end of Wanli in Shaanxi, the population has been expelled and starved to death, and the population has gradually become sparse.
The powerful landlords could not control their tenants from running away, so they had to reduce the rent to attract farmers from other powerful landlords to farm their own fields. As a result, the landlords competed with each other, and the farmers received lower and lower rents.
In the last years of Wanli, the number of landlords in Shaanxi was reduced to only four out of six farmers. In the early years of Chongzhen, the number was further reduced to three out of seven landlords."
Chen Shuren suddenly realized:
During the Little Ice Age in the north, there were successive years of famine, and the land was vast and sparsely populated. Landlords were competing with each other to attract farmers to plant their own land.
There are relatively few disasters in the south, and people do not run away. There are more people and less land, which means farmers get involved with each other and compete for land to be cultivated by landlords.
The many people roll up the people, the land rolls over the land,
Which production factors are not scarce will be affected by them. This is a natural principle, as Mks has said.
But soon, a bigger misunderstanding emerged in Shen Shuren's mind: The landlords have reduced rents, so why are the farmers in Shaanxi even less able to survive? Where did Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong come from?
You can't fake a point, right?
He naturally asked this question.
Fang Yizhi seemed to have expected this question a long time ago, so he took out a volume of notes, which turned out to be Sun Chuanting's writings. It is estimated that it will be included in "Jianlaolu" in later generations, or it may be "Baigu Collection"
》, it has not been officially named yet.
Fang Yizhi put Sun Chuanting's books there and said, "I have read a lot of Governor Sun's notes in his early years. They mentioned that he had been in Shaanxi for many years, raising military rations, supervising the taxation and persuading farmers, and the details of the whole process. There are some contents.
, I couldn’t understand it at first, but now I understand his difficulties.
Governor Sun was once curious: why since the early years of Chongzhen, whenever he went to Shaanxi Province, he saw people farming and never repairing water conservancy. Landowners wanted to do it but couldn't organize it. Even many people still farmed.
No fertilizer at all, just sow thin seeds casually,
Within a few years, the fertility of the land was exhausted, and there was a lack of stable irrigation. In drought years, it was completely barren, and without the root system of vegetation to hold the soil in place, all the good soil on the surface turned into floating soil. The next year, too much water washed away the floating soil, and then it became
It turned into loess and sandy soil. The good land turned into bad land.
Then, because the land is vast and sparsely populated, and the people have no money and are not afraid of migration, and they are not afraid of running out of land wherever they go, a few cunning people, after a piece of land turns into yellow sand after three years of disaster, they change to another township and county to become refugees.
In a place where no one knows, you can pretend to be good, find a new landlord to rent the land, plant it for another year or two, and then change the place after the disaster is over.
To be honest, most people in Shaanxi are actually pure and simple in nature at the beginning, and they don't want to, but a few deceitful and cunning people are mixed in, and the government cannot ban them. And if someone becomes an honest person, the landlord may not be able to guarantee it.
'If I fertilize and maintain water conservancy fields well, they will be able to be planted by me in the future'.
Maybe when he promised to fertilize and build water conservancy projects, the main condition he asked for the land was, "I will only be charged 20% or 30% of the land rent." The landlord pretended to agree at first in order to deceive people into fertilizing the land and maintaining water conservancy projects.
But once the land is well maintained, and in a few years there are refugees coming next door, and they initially offer a higher price, pretending to be willing to give the landlord 40% of the land rent, then the landlord might just "pity these poor people" and give them the good land to plant in exchange.
The farmers who originally fertilized this good land and maintained water conservancy were not allowed to protect their interests in "permanently renting this land". Over time, everyone had no choice but to rush for quick success and fish out of the lake. Whether they are farmers or landlords, they are all good people and will not be rewarded.
, The honest ones starved to death first, and in the last twenty years, the waves washed away the sand, and all the loess was left in Shaanxi, and the good people and gentry also starved to death. The more cunning and cruel the more ruthless they were, the better they survived."
After hearing this long speech, Chen Shuren was completely shocked. He was afraid that Fang Yizhi had summarized it wrong, so he opened the notebook of Sun Chuanting and carefully studied and compared it.
After a long time, he finally determined that all these are the simplest effects in later economics:
For landowners, it’s the tragedy of the commons;
For farmers, bad money drives out good money.
To give the simplest example, ordinary readers of future generations can understand: as long as future generations have lived in rural areas, or at least watched farmers complain about agricultural disputes on Douyin, they generally know these common sense.
In the 21st century, one acre of land is generally rented in China. Depending on the quality of the land, the cheapest land rent is about 400 to 500 yuan a year, and the more expensive good land is 700 to 800 yuan a year.
But there is a type of land that is particularly expensive to rent, and that is renting to grow watermelons. Almost in China, it costs at least 1,500 yuan per acre per year.
This is because modern watermelons are particularly capable of absorbing nutrient waste from the land. After watermelons have been planted on the land for a year, it must be left fallow for a year, and then leguminous plants are used to fix nitrogen and increase fertilizer to restore the soil fertility. No matter how good the land is, one round of watermelons should be planted every three years.
At most, it may take six or seven years for poor fields to be able to grow watermelons again.
Therefore, the land rent to melon farmers is very expensive, 1,500 per year, in order to collect the rent in advance for the subsequent years of land cultivation. The most vicious scammers will often tell the lessor when signing the contract that the land will be used for planting.
Yes, if the lessors are negligent in supervision, they will secretly plant watermelons, rent them for only one year, squeeze the soil dry, and then run away with buckets to change places.
The major land lease disputes that Shen Shuren saw on Douyin in later generations were basically those who broke the contract and secretly planted watermelons.
The problems that exist in Shaanxi today are, in nature, similar to the logic of stealing watermelons through fraud. In the beginning, there were a small number of criminals who were good at fraud. They took advantage of the lack of population and used a relatively high promised land rent to defraud good land for planting. In fact,
If you use the destructive method of fishing from the lake, you will run away with your bucket in a few years.
Then whoever is honest will suffer the consequences. Honest people cannot survive and are eventually forced to imitate.
In the final analysis, the laws of the Ming Dynasty were too imperfect, the government's regulations on household laws were too crude and rigid, and there were no more complete "permanent tenancy" clauses like those in the later Qing Dynasty, nor were there any Western "easement" clauses.
There is a saying that although Shen Shuren was an imperial man, even before he traveled through time, his feelings for the Ming Dynasty absolutely overwhelmed the Qing Dynasty. But when it comes to economic issues, Zhu Yuanzhang, a guy who is extremely controlling and doesn't understand anything, is really for
The Ming Dynasty has caused disasters for hundreds of years.
As long as the Ming Dynasty's economic governance had a fraction of the flexibility, encouragement, and clarity of the Song Dynasty, it would not have ended up like this.
Zhu Yuanzhang's enemy of businessmen was too backward in the protection of subdivided economic rights. He would not allow the Ming Dynasty laws to be changed, only to add them, so that later emperors could not do anything, and the bureaucracy was happy to see the results, and they were eager to make peace with them like this.
, giving them more room to operate.
If the laws of the Ming Dynasty could be more relaxed and detailed, and protect more rights that have not been defined yet, then these situations would definitely be different.
For example, if the government strictly enforces the law, "The farmer signed a contract with the landlord, and I promise to fertilize the fields well every year, and I promise to spend two months of labor every year to maintain the irrigation system in this area, then you have to guarantee that I can at least plant this."
I have owned a piece of land for twenty years, and I cannot change people or land midway just because someone else promised to pay a higher rent than me." Make sure it is implemented in place.
In this way, it is equivalent to the "permanent tenancy rights" that were at least as perfect as the Qing Dynasty. Farmers will not worry about the long-term labor they have put in on this land, and the benefits that will take a long time to repay will be taken away and transferred away midway.
Just like in later generations, the law of a country stipulates that after a shop owner rents a house, the landlord cannot increase the rent before the renovation, depreciation and aging period expires. Only then will the country's physical store business be well-run and have a long-term mentality.
Dry.
If the rent is allowed to be increased at will after the renovation is completed, then who doesn't want to make quick money by doing short work? To catch the whole thing? Of course, you can just grab a bucket and run away.
Of course, rights and obligations are all relative. At the same time, we must strictly enforce the law, legislate, and severely punish landlords who "arbitrarily sublease land with the added value of farmers' long-term labor."
Those farmers who took the lead in cheating and cheating by planting watermelons without fertilizing the land at the beginning, or those who "fraudulently planted watermelons and destroyed farmland" in later generations, should also be severely punished.
Just because he is a farmer does not mean he is absolutely right and does not punish - punishing the cunning and traitors among a small number of farmers is precisely to protect the honest people among the majority of farmers, so that they will not be driven away by bad money from good money.
Because if unscrupulous people are not punished by law, in the future the landlords will treat all honest farmers as unscrupulous people, beware of them, and raise prices.
Just like although the law in later generations will not punish people who "get pregnant just after joining the job", which is legal, over time, women's employment opportunities will be suppressed as a whole. In the end, most women are simple and honest because of the behavior of these tricky people.
Paying the bill.
It is also hard to imagine that in the 21st century, if a large farmer who contracted land for cultivation secretly breached the contract, signed for a different type of crop when signing the contract, obtained the land at a low price, and finally secretly changed to plant destructive crops such as watermelon, then he would be sued in court.
Such fraudulent contractors will definitely be severely punished and compensated.
Chen Shuren's mission is nothing more than to clarify rights and responsibilities, resolve disputes and disputes, provide more protection to honest people, and at the same time severely punish fraudulent rentals and fraudulent leases.
After thinking about all this, Shen Shuren finally figured out how to solve the problem, and also understood what happened in the agricultural production field in Shaanxi in the late Ming Dynasty.
Chen Shuren had also read a lot of books about the late Ming Dynasty in his previous life. In fact, he had heard about the objective fact that farming conditions in Shaanxi had deteriorated before traveling through time. However, in those books, this matter was often explained as
"The natural disasters in Shaanxi are so severe that it is difficult for farmers. The harvest ratio is even less than 1 to 6 or 7. That is to say, if you sow a bushel of millet as seed, you will harvest less than 6 or 7 bushels at the end of the year, and you will not be able to make much of your capital.
What kind of fertilizer is this? So they have a reason, because they really can’t survive.”
Are these historical data objective facts? Of course they are objective facts.
But it is shameless for such a simple and crude writer to use such a single interpretation to please readers with peasant backgrounds who spend money to read the book.
More importantly, the law in Taimo Lake is too arbitrary. Honest people have no basis for legal protection. In the end, everyone is forced to be cunning. In the beginning, there are only a handful of cunning people, but in the end most people are expelled by bad money.
Forced out by good money.
Chen Shuren is not afraid of offending others. He never refuses to say it. He just wants to severely punish those who take the lead in being cunning. Even if they are farmers, he does not feel that if he punishes them, they have violated the zzzz.
"My order is passed on. Although we should slowly improve the legislation and strictly enforce the law in the future, in troubled times, we must use heavy codes. This has happened recently, so we must pick a few examples to show to the public first.
In the past two months at the end of the year, in Yueyang Prefecture, Changsha Prefecture, Wuchang Prefecture, a raid was carried out to see if there was any "lure" to the tenant farmers to build water conservancy projects and fertilize their fields. However, in the end, after the farmers put in the work, they sublet the land at a higher rent.
other people's landowners.
Whenever we encounter them, we should arrest the typical ones and severely punish them directly. Those who can be beheaded must be beheaded, and they should be shown to the public more often.
We will give you a bowl of water and deceive the landowners who infringe on the farmers' permanent tenant rights, as well as the farmers who promise to participate in water conservancy construction and fertilize when planting, but in the end do not repair or fertilize the land, and engage in deceptive and destructive development. We will kill them all.
After shocking people, we will take the opportunity to formally announce new laws and regulations to all counties and townships.
Explain to the people who are originally from Shaanxi that it makes sense for us to charge high rents for farming here. Because our land is good, our efforts to maintain water conservancy and fertilize the fields are guaranteed in the long term. Others cannot take it away casually. You
If I don't agree, I can't exchange land with you, and I can continue to cultivate this field forever.
Therefore, you must take care of the land as your own, and you cannot use the mentality of changing the land after two years of farming and destroying the fertility of the land. Mencius said, those who have a permanent output have perseverance, and those who do not have no perseverance.
That’s it! This is what we call it!
He will protect a piece of land well only if it is guaranteed to be rented and cultivated by him forever! The biggest harm caused by the refugees is to destroy the enthusiasm of farmers to protect the land, and they only want to destroy the land!
If Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong are allowed to continue making troubles without perseverance, Shaanxi will completely turn into a loess plateau in a hundred years!"
Chen Shuren's policy was very convincing, and Fang Yizhi was impressed by it.
It is estimated that if people like Shen Shuren are allowed to legislate and enforce the law in future generations, then the landlords who arbitrarily increase the rent after renovating their shops, and the melon farmers who fraudulently change their land to watermelon planting at low prices, will be severely punished by him.
He is very fair. He will punish cunning lessors severely and he will punish cunning lessees severely. He does not favor any party.
——
ps: Today’s question is not intended to be a rebuke, but it’s just that I have read so many late Ming Dynasty texts that fail to clearly explain the economic principles of the destruction of refugees.
Accidentally, one chapter contains more than 5,000 words. If it’s difficult to break it down, then I won’t break it down. That’s it for today.
My writing has been as smooth and steady as possible, and I have even been a little verbose and stressed over and over again just to keep it straight. But I know that based on the traffic flow, there will definitely be people who criticize me for being inconsiderate of farmers, and I admit it.
This is a complicated world. If you point out the bad guys on both sides, both sides will be offended. To be honest, this is the fate. Fortunately, I admit that my grades are poor.
To put it bluntly, in my original discussions on some issues of property rights law and economic principles, I often heard "the tenants scolded me for favoring the landlord, and the landlords also scolded me for favoring the tenants."
It is quite a feat for a person to be scolded by both those who have vested interests in leasing and those who have vested interests in leasing at the same time.
It makes me wonder if there are no vested interests in this world anymore, because they all feel that they are the losers and a vulnerable group, so they want to criticize me.