Wang Anshi and Sima Guang have many things in common in their private lives, such as not coveting enjoyment, not being good at beautiful officials, neither taking concubines, and neither liking to ride in a palanquin. The Song people said: "Jing Gong and Wen Gong are not good at sound, do not love official positions, and do not breed goods and profits." ...... Therefore, the two fairness give rise to goodness. However, there were almost all-out differences in their political views: Sima Guang maintained the ancestral system, and Wang Anshi emphasized changing the law; Sima Guang agreed with "hiding the rich from the people," and Wang Anshi attached importance to "rich countries and strong soldiers"; Sima Guang advocated "throttling"; Wang Anshi advocated "open source"; Sima Guang believed that "open source" meant that the government should increase heavy taxes and miscellaneous taxes; Wang Anshi believed that it was completely possible to "the people do not add to the endowment and the state to spare"; Sima Guang said: "The goods and things produced in heaven and earth are not in the public household, and if they are not in the people, they are in the public household." ”
Leaving aside the factors of emotion and value preference, how do we view this difference between Wang Anshi and Sima Guang? Is it that Wang Anshi's "the people do not add endowments but the country uses forgiveness" makes sense, or Sima Guang's "the goods and treasures and things produced by heaven and earth, if there are only this number, are not in the people, then in the public"?
If what Sima Guang said is more reasonable, then obviously, there will be no progress in the material civilization of human society, because "the goods and treasures and things born in heaven and earth are only counted." But the visible fact with the naked eye is that modern society has increased its goods and goods by tens of millions of times compared with ancient societies. Therefore, even the scholars who defended Sima Guang had to admit that Sima Guang's judgment was not in line with modern society: "We have personally experienced and heard and witnessed the rapid growth of social wealth, and in more than forty years, from individuals and families to cities and countries, the scale and speed of wealth growth is unprecedented. 'Heaven and earth' is still this 'heaven and earth', and the 'goods and treasures' in between have long since doubled. Therefore, we will feel that Sima Guang is really too conservative. ”
However, those who are in favor of Sima Guang and oppose Wang Anshi's transformation of the law often add that although Sima Guang's judgment is not in line with modern society, it is applicable to ancient society, for example, Professor Zhao Dongmei said: "Have you ever thought about where the driving force for wealth growth in the past forty years has come from?" Institutional innovation, scientific development, technological progress, especially the leadership of Western civilization that has long been in the forefront. None of this happened when Sima Guang and Wang Anshi were discussing the "goods and treasures of heaven and earth.". Without these revolutionary factors, how can there be a revolutionary increase in social wealth? If the total amount of wealth does not grow, then, in the final analysis, the problem of financial management is still a distribution problem, not in the public, but in the private sector, it is a question of which 'rich country' and 'rich people' come first and how to coordinate. What Sima Guang said was not wrong. ”
A similar view can be traced back to Lin Yutang, who wrote the biography of Su Dongpo: "You don't have to be an economist to be confident that the two important factors in a country's wealth are only production and distribution. To increase the wealth of the state, it is necessary to increase production or to distribute it more appropriately. In Wang Anshi's time, it was impossible to increase production, because there was no way to industrialize at that time, so the only thing a financial genius could do was in terms of distribution. Because Wang Anshi is concerned with enriching the national treasury, and increasing the wealth of the country means increasing the government's tax revenue. ”
However, even in the era of Wang Anshi, financial management could only be a distribution problem, and goods and goods were not necessarily "not in the private sector, but in the public". The Southern Song Dynasty Lu You once elaborated on this: "Sima Cheng Xiang said: 'The goods and goods and goods produced by heaven and earth are only counted, and those who are not in the people are in the officials.'" It is not as good as it is. Since the ancient goods are not in the people and are not in the officials, how can they be counted? Or in the power of the courtiers, or in the noble relatives close to the xi, or in the strong generals, or in the merger, or in the old shi. Fang is also the time, the upper house is poor, and the lower is poor, and the people are not ruling the world. ”
The Zhao and Song dynasties founded the country, did not establish a field system, and did not suppress annexation. Therefore, there is a huge disparity between the rich and the poor, taxes are uneven, and the strangers in the field hide their land property to evade the land endowment. The purpose of the "Fangtian Equalization Tax Law" promoted by Wang Anshi is to "make the distribution more appropriate", let the annexation family bear more taxes, and the commoners relatively reduce the tax burden.
What's more, in Wang Anshi's time, was it really "impossible" to increase social wealth through the development of production? An obvious fact is that the Song Dynasty was not far from the Tang Dynasty, and the land area of the Song Dynasty was smaller than that of the Tang Dynasty, but the Song government greatly increased the area of cultivated land and the yield of grain mu higher than that of the Tang Dynasty through methods such as enlistment, irrigation, intensive cultivation, the introduction and promotion of fine seeds of champaid rice, and the protection of private property rights, so that the Song Dynasty had a large amount of surplus grain for winemaking, and the wine industry was unprecedentedly developed.
It is safe to say that the total social wealth and per capita income level of the Song Dynasty exceeded that of the Tang Dynasty, and at the same time maintained rapid population growth. Isn't this an increase in the total wealth of society?
Wang Anshi once proposed: "The rich family has the capital of the country, the rich of the country of the world, if you want to be rich in the world, then the capital of the world." In the Ming Dynasty, Li Yan had a paragraph criticizing Sima Guang, which can be used as a footnote to Wang Anshi's claim: "(Sima Shi) Guang knows that all goods and goods are born of heaven and earth, and that he can count evil deeds. The treasure of the mountains and seas, the gold of Lishui, the bi of Kunshan, the copper, lead, silver and tin, and the five gold and treasures of the land, the daily merchant Jia's wanton, when full of greedy ink bags, I don't know how many of them. He who grows up the nation is born of the interests of heaven and earth. ”
Wang Anshi's method of change is not only a process of redistribution -- the so-called "suppression of mergers" is also a process of expanding production -- the so-called "world of capital" is also, for example, during the implementation of the "Farmland Water Conservancy Law", "the central government built more than 11,000 irrigation and flood control projects", adding more than 100 million mu of farmland, calculated according to the minimum yield of mu (about one stone), that is, it can increase the income by 165-230 million stones of grain per year.
In addition to the construction of agricultural water conservancy projects, the Song government in the Shenzong era also mobilized a large number of manpower and material resources, invested in the construction of canals, docks, bridges, and water mills, invested in the development of copper mines, iron ore mines, and coal mines, and invested in the support and stimulation of industry and commerce. If we look at this set of figures, we can imagine the scale of social wealth growth during Wang Anshi's transformation:
1) During the Xining-Yuanfeng years, the Song government minted 5 million yuan per year, minting for two years, equivalent to the total amount of money minted by the entire Ming Dynasty for more than 200 years.
2) American scholar Hao Ruobei believes that the annual output of iron in the Yuanfeng period reached 75,000-150,000 tons, and Ge Jinfang also believed that the northern Song Dynasty used about 150,000 tons of iron a year, and by the beginning of the eighteenth century, the total iron output of the whole of Europe (including the European part of Russia) was only 145,000-180,000 tons.
3) From the beginning of the Shenzong Dynasty, coal mines were mined on a large scale, and the Song people said that "there are millions of families in The capital, all rely on charcoal, and none of them are paid", that is, it began in the era of Shenzong.
4) The Municipal Yi Division set up by the Song government, mainly engaged in commercial and financial industries, under the jurisdiction of the prefectures and cities, with tens of thousands of staff, can be described as the "trust" of the eleventh century.
5) During the Xifeng Reform Period, the Song government's municipal income reached the peak of the Northern Song Dynasty, with an annual income of about two million yuan. In contrast, the tax, water rate, land salary, and increase in salary levied by the late Ming government from the monthly port trade (the Ming government only opened the port for one month) every year amounted to only 20,000 or 30,000 taels of silver, which was only a fraction of the revenue of the Song Dynasty city.
Therefore, if I had to sum up, I would quote Huang Renyu's statement: "Wang Anshi can arouse the interest of Chinese and foreign scholars today, and his economic ideas are close to our vision." His so-called "new law" is nothing more than the large-scale commercialization of fiscal revenues. When he argued with Sima Guang, he put forward the theory of "the country uses enough without endowment", and its policy is to first stimulate the production and circulation of commodities with bureaucratic capital. If the amount of the economy expands, the tax rate will not change, and the total revenue of the treasury can still increase. This is also a principle that modern national financial managers believe in. ”
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