New Shun 1730

This "prophet" is definitely dead at this time.

And this "prophet" has been a minister all his life, but before he left the world and followed Chisongzi, he said some key words that clearly exceeded the category of "minister", and left some written things.

And the last owner of the written things left by this "prophet" before he left the world was the emperor at that time.

And the emperor at that time was old and exhausted.

Of course, Dashun may not be very familiar with the "prophet" thing.

So, let's put it another way.

Before Wang Mang's reform, the "Zhouguan" and other series of things that suddenly appeared, "written by saints, but burned by burning books and burying scholars, fortunately there is a set of things in the cracks in the wall that can be seen in the world", what is the difference?

Wang Mang said, this is the system of saints and ancestors. Zhou Gong can still jump out of the grave and deny three times: I don't, I am not, don't talk nonsense.

Wang Anshi said, isn't Confucianism politically correct? Okay, I will use "Zhouli" to reform the system, what can you do if you oppose it? You, Su Ziyou, can only write articles to prove that "Zhou Li" is a fake book and unreliable, and then you can refute me in theory. Otherwise, I am correct in theory.

But.

Human life span is too short, while the past history is too long, and archaeology is not well developed - at least in this side where death is as important as life, it is definitely not possible to dig up people's ancestral graves or mausoleums.

Therefore, in the past, this side could and could only use the past to reform the system.

Including, in Europe, Protestants, Puritans... In fact, the word fundamentalism was originally used to describe them. In theory, Dashun can at least talk with Catholicism, but with the Protestant Puritans, there is really no possibility of talking at all... So in fact, they can also be regarded as using the past to reform the system.

By the Enlightenment, using the past to reform the system was actually no longer feasible in Europe. Because... the past can only be used to rely on the Bible. And in the Enlightenment, the Bible itself was almost unreliable.

Therefore, the only options are "the ideal country that exists in reality", "reform the system by relying on the East", "use the outside to satirize the inside", "construct an ideal country that exists in reality but is invisible and intangible to ordinary people and will be broken once they see or touch it".

But obviously, this set of things is impossible to use in Dashun, and it is simply impossible to use it.

Because Dashun won the first war not long ago and also completed the circumnavigation of the world, the size of the earth has been determined, and no existing country is qualified to be an ideal country - it is 1750, and the French agriculture that only plants 1 and harvests 6.3 with fallow is actually equivalent to planting one seed in spring and harvesting three grains of wheat in autumn is ideal? Or is it the British industry that can't afford to play with India and has to issue an administrative order to ban the wearing of cotton cloth to support it? Or is it the retro ideal of the Puritans who ran to North America, "those who till the land have their own land, there are visible saints to teach, and benevolence and love each other"?

Since there is no ideal country outside.

The Dashun’s own retro-style is actually shaky - it’s bullshit from the inside out, and Dashun is not right; the key from the outside to the inside, those systems, rules, etc., are mostly fake as proved by a bunch of books by people who play with textual research.

And the more realistic problem is that the population of Dashun has increased rapidly, and the retro-style cannot solve a problem: that is, even if you say that the kingly government is restored, the well-field system is restored, and the per capita land is 3 mu, even if the eleventh tax is exempted, can you guarantee that you will be full?

The ancients said that a family of five with a hundred mu of land has 20 mu of land per capita. You can restore the well-field system, but how can you restore the per capita land of 20 mu? As long as you restore it, you can turn it into land? Or as long as you restore it, the per mu yield will increase by 500% immediately?

Therefore, the only thing left for the vision, fantasy, or not-so-empty fantasy of the future that can be understood under the current language and material conditions is Liu Yu’s stuff.

Old Ma said: [Distribution itself is the product of production].

And this stuff, when it is said at this time, is too difficult to understand. Even in later times, when literacy rates have generally improved, this literal understanding of the meaning of the word has nothing to do with what Ma said about production relations. Ma's focus has never been pure production, but production relations and distribution.

Liu Yu said half and used half, solving a problem that Dashun must not bypass - he distorted [distribution itself is a product of production] into "food is to fill the stomach, people use food instead of loving food, so industry and commerce are just a distribution of food."

In a sense, he solved the "primary and secondary" problem that has been stuck in Dashun in theory.

Although the distortion is not even at the level of production for production.

But at this time, the distortion is conducive to dissemination.

Food is to fill the stomach, people use food instead of loving food, so industry and commerce are just a distribution of food. This sentence can be regarded as the "theoretical basis" for Dashun to develop industry and commerce, and it can also be regarded as something similar to "agriculture" on Dashun.

This sentence itself contains two meanings.

First: to talk about distribution, we must first produce.

Second: if there is enough production, industry and commerce as a means of food distribution can accommodate enough people.

This is the basis for Liu Yu to promote the development of industry and commerce in Dashun.

If we go back to ancient times and do not come up with a basic self-consistent logic to the emperor who does not have enough food, but instead starts to promote the idea of ​​budding and emphasizing commerce, the result will probably be similar to the emperor who faces continuous peasant uprisings and thinks that the self-ringing clock is a gimmick.

Lao Ma made it very clear that commercial capital may not necessarily change productivity. The greater possibility is that it is parasitic under the current level of productivity, such as the package purchase system, robbery system, etc.

The emphasis on agriculture and neglect of commerce here is not because the ancients were fools, but simply because commercial capital has long been discovered to be extremely parasitic when it exists as an independent capital.

Li Kui's original words clearly meant that engaging in luxury goods would affect the hemp textile industry, and encouraging luxury goods would lead to trouble. As a result, he was labeled as focusing on agriculture and neglecting business. Thomas Moe, who said that governments should introduce policies to curb domestic luxury and waste, was no unknown figure. He was described in The Wealth of Nations as "a fundamental principle in the political economy of all other commercial nations."

Sang Hongyangduo's obvious mercantilist tendencies were labeled as favoring agriculture over business - what is mercantilism? As described by Adam Smith, the herdsmen on the British coast secretly sold wool, and if they were caught, they would cut off their hands or hang them from trees. This was called mercantilism; if British merchant ships dared to sneak to the east of the Cape of Good Hope, they would be directly sunk if caught. The goods were divided half and half with the British government. This was called mercantilism.

Here, dynasties have brought mercantilism relatively close, including the Song Dynasty, which wanted to collect taxes on every fart and sell only shit.

It’s called mercantilism if you only focus on controlling everything.

If there is no tax on industry and commerce and domestic free trade is practiced, that is called physiocrats.

By this time, the development of productivity was no longer comparable to that of the Song Dynasty.

As the productive forces become more developed, it is no longer possible to practice the mercantilism of the Song Dynasty. This is not a simple problem of organizational skills, or a problem of regression in political construction, but that after the development of productive forces reached the stage of the mid-Ming Dynasty, mercantilism was completely unachievable in the country.

The Physiocratic School said that "taking China as the teacher" was not simply a fantasy of a utopia. But this is actually the case.

Therefore, under these conditions, the question in Dashun is not to argue whether it is mercantilism or whether it emphasizes agriculture and neglects commerce. It is not impossible to argue. The French school of physiocrats is essentially mercantile-the land only produces value. , Industry and commerce are nothing, they just change the shape and appearance of the things produced by the land, and are worthless, so don't worry about them at all. They are already "worthless". Isn't this called light business?

This argument, in which rhetoric outweighs substance, is meaningless in Dashun.

What is really meaningful is how to change the problem of "commercial capital always thinking about being parasitic on the old system." Guide commercial capital to lose its independence and become part of the production factor "capital" of capital society - a black horse is a horse, instead of a white horse being a white horse and a black horse being a black horse.

The final solution, in other words, is called the "average rate of profit on capital" problem.

So, from this set, we can also deduce the internal problem of Dashun-the equalization of land.

How to solve the problem of excessive profits from buying land, hoarding it, and collecting rent?

Liu Yu doesn't have this ability. The final solution is that the industry is extremely developed and farming without subsidies will lose all his money. That is a solution that treats the symptoms and the root cause.

Obviously, Liu Yu definitely doesn't have this ability. Moreover, in 1860, when Britain used the power of the first industrial revolution to dominate the seven seas, and when workers became aristocrats, the world's markets squeezed India to the extreme. How many worker aristocrats did it create in total? Not to mention the country’s population, which is close to two-fifths of the world’s, but is it enough to cover the population of Shandong Province in Dashun?

So since you don’t have the ability, can you change your mind?

It cannot solve the problem of commercial capital running to cultivated land, or the average profit rate of industrial capital cannot compare with buying land and collecting rent.

So, after equalizing land, is it okay to establish a land-mu system in the Chinese dynasty and prohibit land sales?

Indeed, the rate of return from annexing land is high, so is it okay to issue an administrative order directly to prohibit annexation?

Since it is said that Britain can rely on the cotton ban, the Irish Wool Act, the Commodity Enumeration Act, the Navigation Act, etc., to develop its own cotton textile industry and make it a pillar force of the Industrial Revolution.

Then, Dashun relies on the land system to prevent capital from flowing to cultivated land, and allows commercial capital to flow up to industry. Ultimately, through industrial development, commercial capital will be eliminated as a separate thing, and black horses will become horses. In the future, white horses, black horses, and yellow horses will be eliminated. Is it okay to ride the horse whichever is faster, thereby forcing a set of industrial power that will make the rest of the world despair?

In essence, Liu Yu's ideas for the future of industry and commerce have always been centered around this goal.

However, in order to achieve the goal, taking the shortest straight line is precisely the most difficult thing under the current conditions.

Therefore, he went around in circles and deliberately misinterpreted the relationship between production and distribution described in Lao Ma's statement "Distribution itself is the product of production".

It is twisted into "food is to fill the stomach, people use food rather than love food, so industry and commerce is just a distribution of food."

Starting from the issue of rebellion and the instability of the country, which the emperor was most worried about, and starting from the principle that "people who have no food to eat may rebel", which is basically not mentioned in economics, they tied food and industrial and commercial development together to confuse the public.

With subsequent reforms, did Liu Yu improve Dashun's agricultural productivity?

In fact, eliminating the factors causing flooding in the Huanghuai River has basically not improved the situation.

Then why does the northern Jiangsu area, which receives relief almost every year, no longer need relief?

Because of Dashun's shipbuilding and military reform, the rice that can be used as commodities from North Korea, Japan, and Nanyang can be counted as Dashun's rice.

So with the support of warships and bayonets, Liu Yu seemed to show many people in Dashun that what he said was right - industry and commerce can really feed them.

The essence of this sentence is that external expansion and colonization can indeed solve the problem of food.

However, the cover and obfuscation of industry and commerce is used.

Why does he have to build ships, reform the military, and expand first? Rather than within Dashun, debate the scriptures and deny "emphasis on agriculture and neglect of business" and "emphasis on the fundamentals over the weak"?

Because he went to elementary school, he calculated that based on the United Nations' food and clothing line of 560 kilograms of grain per capita, Dashun's current population, cultivated land, yield per mu, and technical level would definitely slap him in the face.

And he also knew that in the 18th century, the productivity levels of East Asia and Western Europe were by no means backward. If they did not close the country, they would be overwhelmed by Europe, which had developed productivity. This is purely a matter of carving a boat for a sword, taking a sword from the early 20th century and rowing a boat from the 18th century.

The real problem is that European commercial capital is completely reactionary and wants to go it alone. Europe's handicraft industry hinders progress and requires the introduction of various restrictions.

Therefore, we must analyze the problem in order to solve it. If you analyze the problem wrongly, you will probably get a wrong answer.

Now that we have the right idea for analyzing the problem, how can we destroy the reactionary commercial capital in Europe? How can we abolish the British administrative decrees and the review of the commodity enumeration law that hinder free trade?

Build ships.

Building ships, sailing to Southeast Asia, conquering Japan, and fighting a war were all done in one go, which in turn verified Liu Yu's "prophecy" in Dashun-industry is the future.

Although, this is equivalent to using a dark horse to beat scalpers to prove that black is faster than yellow. For example, more than 40 years ago, Dashun's cotton production level did not improve significantly, but it significantly improved Songsu's production level. living standards of the region. Liu Yu used this to talk about the great significance of industry and commerce, but if you think about it carefully, the first improvement in the living standards of Songsu textile practitioners seems to have little to do with industry and commerce, but purely because Dashun built ships and sailed to Nanyang, which blew up the Netherlands. , snatched the Nanyang cotton cloth market developed by the Netherlands, thereby destroying Surat's cotton textile industry, and incidentally grabbed the bulk pricing power of rice in Nanyang...

However, Liu Yufei said that the black horse outperformed the scalpers because the black horse was faster than the yellow horse. At least that's how he explained it. Therefore, this also convinced many people in Dashun that there is still a way to develop industry and commerce in the future. Liu Yu's statement that industry and commerce is a means of distributing food is not unreasonable, and it seems to make sense.

In this case, it seems that the future can really move forward according to the idea of ​​​​accommodating hundreds of millions of people through industry and commerce. Instead of being trapped in the despair that has always been lingering on the minds of Lord Li Gang and others: "What should we do if industry and commerce cannot accommodate so many non-agricultural people?"