New Shun 1730

It is still unknown what the wind direction will be in a few years.

But the current wind direction can be seen by just looking at this year's change of era.

The magistrate of Funing County was in a dilemma, and his face was still cautious like a young wife.

After a few more words, the people sorted out everything, and the rest of the things were very simple.

Very simple.

Just as Liu Yu thought, the Huaibei salt reform was not that troublesome at all. Things here are really simple.

For example, the Huaibei salt reform, as long as the emperor allowed it, grasp the details of "transforming smugglers into merchants" to make private salt dealers clean and regular, the rest are all shit, what ability do salt merchants have to resist the will of the imperial power? If they really have this ability, they would have trained a model army to hold the emperor's head there and change the monopoly of salt from renting to owning it.

It is definitely better to own something than to rent it from others.

Among the salt reforms, the emperor's permission was the most difficult and complicated. That's why there was the previous twenty years of foundation building, which gave the emperor another source of tax revenue and emergency financial options.

The salt reform seemed to be just a few words in the court, but in fact it was the result of the reforms of the previous twenty years of Dashun.

As for the rest, it was really nothing.

Including Liu Yu's fear that the salt merchants would fight to the death to disrupt the salt market, that was all about kneeling down to beg the imperial power not to interfere with it, and praying that these salt merchants had some skills and abilities.

The same thing happened here.

The real difficulty of this matter was to abolish the Grand Canal, repair the Huaihe River, and support the salt reform with a policy system of reclamation, so that the emperor had to kill these gentry in order to create a northern Jiangsu that did not need disaster relief every year.

The rest, whether it was conviction, arrest, house seizure, or accusation, was nothing.

From a broad perspective, to put it bluntly, this matter was to turn northern Jiangsu into an agricultural area, abandon the salt industry area and the canal transportation commercial system.

In the small, those were not a problem at all.

Whether it was Liu Yu or the governor of Huanghuai and others, at this point, they could just sit here and rest.

The magistrate of Funing County can do it himself.

Soon, hundreds of carefully selected people came here crying, kneeling on the ground and shouting "Master Qingtian" and so on, telling the sufferings of the gentry's abuse of them.

Actually, it's nothing.

It's nothing more than bullying men and women, usury, mourning for dogs, sleeping with new wives, selling daughters to pay rent, monks paying tenants to marry wives and monks sharing them.

Liu Yu has been numb to these things. If the ownership of means of production is not resolved, these moral issues will emerge one after another. What's the point of being angry? You can't sleep with the wife, but if you don't sleep with it, you will starve to death if you can't rent the land. What can you do? The monk pays for the tenant to marry a wife, but if he doesn't pay, he can't marry a wife at all. Sharing is worse than nothing, right?

If you have time to be angry, you might as well solve it fundamentally.

Anger is meaningless.

What is meaningful is what to do after anger.

However, once it came to this point, the court was all playing dumb.

Starting with the emperor, he played dumb. He collected the little national tax himself. If the grassroots didn't have money and had to pay more taxes, he pretended not to know. A gentleman stays away from the kitchen. If the grassroots pay more taxes, it's the grassroots bastards who have nothing to do with him.

Ministers, gentry, and scholars also played dumb. They pretended not to know. If the ownership of the means of production is not resolved, these things will emerge in an endless stream.

So when they heard about these things, they were "shocked" and "furious", and then moral condemnation was the justice, and then they did what they had to do.

Repeating yesterday's anger and the story of the day before yesterday, it was like the reincarnation of a hundred years of solitude.

Liu Yu's three views were different from theirs. He didn't care whether morality was noble or corrupt. The reason for moving the gentry was very clear, which was the land issue, which had nothing to do with morality. Reducing land rent, expanding the domestic demand market, and promoting the budding development of capital was the highest righteousness, and those morals were all small righteousness.

If you have great righteousness, what's the use of small righteousness?

But the problem is that the righteousness he recognized is definitely not the mainstream righteousness of Dashun. That's why the emperor dared to use him, because he was a marginal person, and those who cut the hangings were marginal people like him.

With Liu Yu's policy of constantly nurturing the budding of capital, if there were Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong, he would have to be killed first. If he couldn't be Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong, what would the emperor be afraid of?

Now that everyone is pretending to be stupid, Liu Yu, who plays with muskets, now has to learn archery.

So he still pretended to be angry and slammed the table, and even performed a scene of slamming his wrist in a fit of anger.

He dislocated his wrist, and the others were even more angry, and they all increased their stakes.

If you don't dislocate your wrist, you will appear to be not a gentleman and have no compassion.

In just a few days, a thick book of more than 200,000 words, "Records of Evil Gentry in Huai'an", which makes people angry if they don't read it, and tears if they don't read it, they have no compassion, was compiled.

Once this booklet was compiled, the rest was much easier.

All the gentry who had contracted the land together were examined in batches, and each person was locked in a separate thatched shed to expose and report each other's crimes, corruption, deductions, and reselling in the issue of river engineering funds.

This included exchanging the white flour and rice of the court for coarse grains and inferior rice; the money given by the court to those earthen baskets was made into free apportionment; when paying for the labor service, the silver and money were compared in large and small measures; the digging tools were obviously paid by the court, but they were deducted from the labor service money of the river workers...

And so on.

After the review here, Liu Yu looked at the thick list, holding a pen, and basically didn't even read it, and quickly ticked the list.

Draw a check mark, and then a line of words will be written behind it: Execution by firing squad, confiscation of property and land to be returned to the government. His wife, concubines, sons, and daughters will be counted according to the number of people, and each will be given ten acres of land, and the family's movable property and floating property will be eleven.

It took most of the day to check the list. Liu Yu stretched his fingers, stretched his waist, and handed the list to the official next to him for a look.

After reading it, several people praised: "The Duke is kind-hearted. According to the rules of this dynasty, his wife and daughter should be sent to the Western Regions to be married to the border troops, and his sons over 14 should be exiled to the Western Regions, Whale Sea, Yunnan, and Tibet."

Liu Yu sighed and said: "Mencius said: Compassion is the beginning of benevolence. Although I have little education, I know something about the teachings of sages."

After listening to everyone praising his kindness, Liu Yu handed the list to the people below and said: "Go and collect the silver. Send someone here to notify their families to collect the bodies. I will pay for the travel expenses."

"Don't rush to confiscate the property. Those who want to run can run, and those who want to hide can hide. Anyway... it's okay as long as the fields don't have legs."

"Besides, there are not enough professional staff, and it is not convenient to confiscate the property. After reporting to the emperor and sending enough capable officials, we can do the rest."

Liu Yu calculated that after the land was recovered, it would be redistributed to the people. If it is just a redistribution, it will be useless. My leniency in not confiscating the family property and floating wealth for the time being will make these families rise again within a few years.

However, once the subsequent supporting measures are put in place, it can basically be slightly controlled.

There are two supporting measures in total.

Paper money.

Green seedling loans.

The court is the only financial institution in the land reform area of ​​northern Jiangsu. Through green seedling loans, even if small farmers go bankrupt and lose their land, the land will flow back to the court.

The role of issuing paper money is to use the system of private ownership of land and the small farmers' thirst for land, and let the farmers in northern Jiangsu serve as a reservoir for over-issued currency.

They dare not consume in a short period of time, but will definitely sell their grain to save money to buy land.

The land is guaranteed to flow back to the court through green seedling loans and other means. And the court collects paper money.

Therefore, these small farmers in northern Jiangsu can save at least a million taels of paper money to ensure that they will not appear in the market, but accumulate them to prepare for buying land in a few years.

Their actions of selling grain, cotton, and oil for money, in turn, guaranteed the value of paper money. Currency can buy things, sell grain, cotton, oil, ironware, land, etc., which is already a fully qualified currency in northern Jiangsu.

Why did northern Jiangsu dare to issue Qingmiao loans? Aren't they worried that the court would collect debts and affect the court's image?

Because the Huaihe River was repaired, the canal was abandoned, and the water level of Hongze Lake was lowered, and the speed of small farmers going bankrupt here was reduced.

Secondly, the court's lending and collecting money was of course accompanied by violence. But this is not a problem, because the Zhang family's bankrupt land was recovered by Qingmiao loans, and the Li family would not be sad, but happily took out the money they saved to buy the Zhang family's auction land from the court.

The purpose of Qingmiao loans is not to collect interest, but to promote paper money and ensure that the land flows back to the court. This is completely different from the purpose of issuing Qingmiao loans for interest.

If paper money can be promoted, the profit will be much greater than that little interest, which is only a few cents.

Anyway, Liu Yu's goal is paper money, in order to over-issue a certain amount of paper money to quickly complete the Huaihe irrigation area project.

When issuing currency, sometimes we have to consider the national conditions of Dashun.

Considering that after the small farmers are allocated land, they will not think about consumption at all, but will definitely save the circulating currency to buy land.

Such a good opportunity, such a good reservoir, do not over-issue currency, increase investment to quickly build infrastructure, foreign textile factories, coal mines and coal transportation roads, irrigation areas and tide dikes, what are you waiting for?

Through the model of paper money-grain-project.

It seems that the value of paper money is supported by silver, but in fact it is supported by the grain of farmers in northern Jiangsu after land reform.

In the end, the over-issued paper money is used to buy the grain of farmers in northern Jiangsu, and these grains are used to provide farmers in northern Jiangsu to complete the construction of irrigation areas and seawalls.

At the same time, through paper money accumulation, per mu tax reform and seedling loans, the land price of reclaimed land in northern Jiangsu was increased, which reduced the profit rate of capital buying farmland for rent, forcing capital in southern Jiangsu to either reclaim wasteland or invest in industry and commerce, and not always think about buying land for rent and lending at high interest rates.

The main purpose of tax reform and water conservancy construction is to rely on the desire of a large number of new self-cultivating farmers for land to raise land prices.

The more stable the self-cultivating farmers are, the less likely it is to impose taxes on them. The higher the land price, the lower the return rate of buying land for rent.

At the same time, there is no need to worry about enclosure and driving away small farmers, because self-cultivating farmers can raise land prices, and the price of buying cultivated land is too high, so capital is far less likely to go to the wasteland to reclaim wasteland and grow cotton.

As for the plan of northern Jiangsu to be an economic vassal of southern Jiangsu, he values ​​the reclamation companies that enter the market to enclose land, rather than these small farmers.

These small farmers are doing it for the emperor to see: You see, I am working hard to protect the small peasant economy. Because I know that the small peasant economy is the foundation of your Li Dynasty, and I am a loyal minister.

Sometimes, after taking two steps forward, you must take a step back to show the emperor.

He did not think that this was a major reform at all. As long as the land can be bought and sold, isn't it just a cycle of equal distribution of land and annexation?

It was just that in view of the harsh environment in northern Jiangsu before, the speed of annexation was several times faster than other places. It was only a hundred years after the founding of the country, and it was just a manual balancing. It was a pure tinkering method. Without supporting policies, it would not last more than 30 years, and a new round of annexation would begin.

Just do what the emperor likes and show it to the emperor.

This is more like a deal:

Liu Yu created 300,000 stable small farmers for the emperor, solved the problem of northern Jiangsu, which was a bit too much annexation, relieved the emperor's worry that Lianghuai would become the cancer of the empire and the forerunner of the king, and cured the "fragile kidney" of the empire in northern Jiangsu. A bad kidney will not kill people, but the legs, feet and hands may take the opportunity to feel sore, numb and swollen

The emperor supported Liu Yu's plan for the reform of the salt policy, Huainan desalting and reclamation, capital entering the reclamation, Lianyungang drying salt, Huainan changing to an agricultural area, and taking advantage of the opportunity of abolishing the canal and repairing the Huaihe River to complete the economic structure adjustment of Lianghuai. It seemed that the emperor had made a big profit, and continued the emperor's inner court extension plan.