The "Qi Dongye Language" written by the famous lyricist Zhou Mi at the end of the Song Dynasty and the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty has a record of "the lightest Han rent" and a record of "knowing thirty taxes and one tax, and the system of the Han family is also frequent". A lover of meticulous records of the history of the lost wilderness, he is a person with a heart, and his works include "Qi Dongye Language", "Old Events of Wulin", "Miscellaneous Knowledge of Decay", etc. People often say that the master is in the folk, this is true, although the wild history is wild history, but most of them are superior works, not only to correct the shortcomings of history, but also to make history three-dimensional.
Zhou Mi lamented that from the Qin and Han dynasties to the two Song Dynasties, the taxes of the Han Dynasty were the lightest. In fact, not only to the two Song Dynasties, but also to the entire feudal era, there was no lighter tax than the Han Dynasty. The Han Dynasty is the most important dynasty in ancient China, the Han Dynasty laid the foundation and pattern of China's two thousand years of feudal dynasties, and its political and economic achievements profoundly affected the future dynasties, and the subsequent Tang and Song Dynasties were just "upgraded versions" of it.
The "well field system" that originated in the Western Zhou Dynasty was, in the final analysis, an early crude "communism", a large pot of rice, relatively low productivity, and all relying on manpower. In the pre-Qin classic "The Fifteenth Year of the Transmission of Hub Liang and Xuangong", it is recorded: "The ancients took three hundred steps as a mile, and the name was Ri Ida. Ida people, nine hundred acres, public land one. "The land is state-owned, the common people cultivate, first plough the public land, and then cultivate the private land, a bit like the land co-production contract responsibility system, but this system can not be implemented later, and gradually abolished, the reason is very simple, because of the emergence of iron and cattle farming, the change in productivity has brought about the improvement of production efficiency, and the improvement of production efficiency has broken through the existing institutional barriers."
After the shang martingale transformation law, the land became completely private, how did the state apparatus work? How to build the Great Wall? This requires a tax. How much is it appropriate to tax? This is a big problem, the benevolent see the benevolent, the wise see the wise. For thousands of years, people have relied on the sky to eat, and the people have taken food as the sky. If the taxes are too heavy, the people will not be able to make a living, or even rise up, and if the taxes are too light, the state apparatus will win weakly, and it will not be enough to support the national defense forces and the bureaucratic system that maintains the country's independence and the daily operation. The wise rulers have no other, but seek truth from facts and advance with the times; the faint rulers do not have him, eat grain, and do nothing.
The tax rate under Liu Bang and his son Liu Ying, the Emperor Hui of Han, was only 1/15, or 6.5, and by the time of Emperor Wen of Han, the tax burden had been halved to 1/30, 3.3%, of which three years were completely tax-free, and his son Emperor Jingdi of Han continued to comply with it. Emperor Guangwu of the Eastern Han Dynasty said: The implementation of low tax rates is the ancestral system of our Han family! It seems that the "rule of Wenjing" is by no means an empty wind, it is completely a prosperous world spawned by the tax reduction policy, and it is precisely based on the national policy of recuperation and light rumors that the productive forces that suffered great damage in the war and chaos at the end of the Qin Dynasty quickly returned to normal levels.
One of the main reasons why the Han Dynasty became the first dynasty in China to continue for more than two hundred years since the Xia And Shang Zhou Dynasties was that the low tax burden was one of the main reasons. Not only is the tax burden low, but whenever there is a famine, it is also reduced or reduced, and whenever the emperor ascends the throne, or encounters a good thing, it is all pardoned, and there is even a state loan system to support those peasants who owe rents.
However, the state cannot always base itself on low taxes, so why should it resist foreign insults? So why build water conservancy and control the river? In this way, why do we help the victims of disasters and help the needy? Why pay salaries and bonuses to the officials? Before Emperor Wudi of Han, the Han-Hungarian War basically ended in the defeat of the Han Dynasty, the Han Dynasty swallowed its anger and calmed down the people, and when it came to Emperor Wu of Han, it did not want to endure anymore, but the war was to spend silver, can not increase taxes, where does silver come from?
Emperor Wu of Han had two financial masters, one was Sang Hongyang, who gave Han Wudi an idea—salt and iron monopoly and suanjiao, and one was Zhang Tang, who also gave Advice to Emperor Wudi of Han—to tell him.
People can not be a day without salt, ploughing the field must also be inseparable from iron, these two items are monopolized by the state, the business is of course good, Emperor Wu of Han fished a handful, you can go to the western region to buy sweat and blood BMW.
Sang Hongyang's economic new policy is not only this, he also introduced a policy of equal loss and equalization, the state became a businessman, participated in the transaction of bulk goods, bought cheaply and sold expensively, and adjusted the surplus, which not only stabilized prices, but also increased fiscal revenue. He also recovered the right to mint coins, unified the currency system, greatly improved the efficiency of the empire's economic operation, and later he also introduced the method of donating officials and liquor monopolies, and earned a lot of silver for Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty.
To say that more genius economic policy is to be counted and sued. What is reckoning and telling? In the Han Dynasty, the rope used to wear copper coins was a thousand words. To put it in layman's terms, the reckoning is that businessmen declare their own taxes, and the accusation is a heavy punishment for those who conceal and do not report, and encourages whistle-blowing and exposing, and those who expose it are seriously rewarded. It is said that "no business is not adulterous", who is willing to pay taxes to the state!
As a result, the normal tax declaration and confiscation made a lot of money for Emperor Wudi of Han, and all this was achieved on the basis of not raising agricultural taxes, and it seems that Emperor Wudi of Han achieved the goal of enriching the country and strengthening the army with macro-control of emphasizing agriculture and light commerce. With this silver, the Han cavalry, under the leadership of Wei Qing and Huo Zhiyi, swept through the desert and was invincible, and the balance of the Han-Hungarian War fell to this end of the Han Dynasty, and the offensive and defensive momentum was easy.
Of course, intellectuals would criticize Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty for being poor in military force, good at daxigong, extravagant, indulgent, sealing Zen, cruising, rewarding, defeating family members, and so on, but the improper family does not know chai mi gui, not only to attack the Xiongnu in the north, to defend the family and defend the country, but also to rest with the people, not to increase the land endowment, not to fight your businessmen's ideas, do you say there is any other better way? However, Comrade Wudi of the Han Dynasty was extravagant and wasteful, and did not abide by the "Eight Regulations" and deserved to be criticized. What is valuable is that Comrade Wudi of the Han Dynasty was very self-aware and also had the spirit of self-criticism, and in the fourth year of Zhenghe (89 BC), he committed crimes against himself and counted his own improprieties, which historians called "Luntai Zhao", and even Sima Guang praised him for being able to correct his mistakes when he knew his mistakes, so the Han Dynasty did not repeat the mistakes of Qin Shi Huang.
Of course, for Sang Hongyang, there was a more "academic" criticism at that time, that is, to accuse the imperial court of "competing with the people for profits", and a special conference was held for this purpose, which was called the "Salt and Iron Conference" by later generations. However, there is only one sentence in the Book of Han: In February (the sixth year of Emperor Zhao of Han), zhao you asked the county to be virtuous and the literary people were suffering. Salt, iron and liquor were discussed.
The "virtuous" and "literary" here are all able people recommended by the chancellor at the suggestion of Emperor Han Zhao, which is a wise man, and there was no examination system in the Han Dynasty, but the emperor began to have a secretary. What was the outcome of this meeting? Only the abolition of the liquor monopoly, the other "tao sound is still the same".
SangHong Sheep was the first person on the earth to practice state capitalism in the ages, and in the long history that followed the path of Sanghong Sheep, Wang Anshi, Zhang Juzheng, and Adam. Smith or Keynes, if you want to say that the difference is only a difference in versions, the current economic policy is only the 3.0 or 4.0 version of Sang Hong sheep. Looking at the current economists who are clamoring about "the country enters and the people retreat" or "the people enter the country and retreat", this "salt and iron conference" seems to have been held for nearly two thousand years and has not yet been completed! Unfortunately, neither the "Records of History" nor the "Book of Han" gave Sang Hongyang a biography!