Chapter 149: Difficulties in Reform
Seeing Shi Fenglai asking about it, Chongzhen smiled smugly and said, "I think that in dealing with the bandits, we should give equal importance to suppression and appeasement, with suppression as a supplement and appeasement as the main priority!"

"So-called appeasement is not recruitment. Bandits have always been disloyal. Even if they temporarily accept the imperial court's recruitment, it is difficult to guarantee that they will not rebel again."

"So the so-called comfort is to comfort the people of the world, so that the people can have enough food and warm clothes, and there will naturally be no more bandits in the world!"

Chongzhen's remarks on both suppression and appeasement were derived from Wang An's view that "the people will never rebel as long as they have food to eat."

Shi Fenglai nodded repeatedly when he heard this. Chongzhen was right on the point, but...

"Natural disasters are frequent, officials are greedy, and there are internal and external troubles. How can it be easy to ensure that the people have enough food and clothing?" Shi Fenglai said with a sigh.

Chongzhen nodded and said, "I think so too, but as the saying goes, man proposes, God disposes. You have to do it before you know whether it is easy or not."

At this point, Shi Fenglai could not see that Chongzhen had another purpose in calling him here, so he immediately followed up with the question, "Does the underworld already have a strategy for governing the country that you can teach me?"

“Hahaha,” Chongzhen laughed, “Whether this is a good way to govern the country is still unknown, but I would like to give it a try!”

After saying this, Chongzhen immediately abolished the Liao salary, re-implemented the Yitiaobian system, and on the basis of this system, implemented the system of allocating land tax to each acre of land.

After explaining the concept of the land tax in detail, Chongzhen looked at Shi Fenglai with eagerness, "What do you think, Prime Minister?"

However, Chongzhen did not notice that Shi Fenglai had already been stunned by Chongzhen's wild ideas.

It would be fine if we just said that Chongzhen intended to revive the Single Whip Law, after all, the court had never explicitly abolished the Single Whip Law. It was only because of Zhang Juzheng's death that the enforcement was greatly reduced, and it was even deliberately misinterpreted by lower-level officials, becoming another weapon to exploit the people.

If Chongzhen wanted to revive this law, he simply had to select capable people to supervise its strict implementation.

But, should the tax be distributed according to the land area?

As soon as you hear this thing, you know that it is mainly aimed at landlords and powerful people. Whoever has more land will pay more taxes!
And from what Chongzhen said just now, this tax law is to evenly distribute the national tax receivables among the number of registered fields in the country.

For example, there are ten rich and poor families. The rich one has a hundred acres of land and ten people in his family; while the poor ones each have only five acres of land and five people in their family.

Before the implementation of the poll tax system, assuming a head tax of one penny of silver was collected from each person, a total of 55 people from two rich and poor families should be charged 5.5 taels of silver.

The rich family should pay one tael of silver, and the nine poor families should pay four taels and five cents of silver.

After the implementation of the tax distribution system, the five taels and five thousand silver coins were evenly distributed to 145 acres of land, and the tax payable per acre was about three cents and eight cents of silver.

Then, nine poor households with a total of 45 people only need to pay about 1 liang 7 qian;
As for the rich, since they owned the most land, they had to pay about three taels and six cents of silver in total.

In other words, the total population of the rich is not as large as that of the poor, but because the rich own the most land, even more than the total of the poor, the amount of silver they need to bear is far more than the amount they had to bear before.

This means that the extra part is borne by ordinary people; in this way, the court has reduced the burden on ordinary people while ensuring that the total amount of tax remains unchanged.

The poor have always accounted for the majority of the population in any era. The policy of allocating land tax to each person can be described as robbing the rich to help the poor. If we only consider the number of people, it will undoubtedly be supported and cheered by almost the entire Ming Dynasty.

But the land tax is not without disadvantages, that is, the landlords who own a lot of land will almost without exception have resistance. It is conceivable that once Chongzhen officially announced that the law would be implemented, it would definitely be fiercely opposed by the government and the people except for the ordinary people.

Moreover, because the tax was evenly distributed among all the registered fields in the country, it meant that even the fields owned by the princes and nobles would be subject to taxation.

The scene of clerks from the government office running to the prince's palace to collect taxes was so beautiful that Shi Fenglai dared not even think about it.

He could not even imagine that the government and the people would unite to resist the edict of Emperor Chongzhen and the imperial court.

To put it bluntly, the Ming Dynasty court is now facing internal and external troubles and is already in a precarious situation. If it offends the gentry class again, it will have no place to stand!
Seeing Shi Fenglai's pale face, how could Chongzhen not know what he was thinking.

In fact, on the way back, Chongzhen had already carefully considered the feasibility of equalizing the land tax.

The final conclusion is that apart from the fierce resistance from the gentry class, everything else is almost all good with no disadvantages.

From then on, the severity of taxes depended only on the amount of land owned. People with less land and hard times paid less taxes, while landlords with more land and comfortable times paid more taxes.

The landlord will not starve to death because he pays a few more taels of silver, but the tenant farmer who lives in poverty may have an extra meal for the little less silver he pays.

Moreover, because the essence of the system of allocating the capitation tax to each plot of land is to distribute the capitation tax among the number of plots of land, it thus achieves in disguise a form of never increasing taxes.

No matter how large the population is, as long as the amount of land they own remains unchanged, the taxes they need to pay will remain the same.

This has certain positive significance in encouraging population growth.

Of course, for the Ming Dynasty, which is still shrouded in the power of the Little Ice Age, it is too early to consider population growth at this time.

However, even though Shi Fenglai was not an expert in arithmetic, he could still foresee that the combination of the land-based tax system and the single whip system would greatly reduce the burden on the people.

As long as the burden on the people can be reduced and they can still have food to eat and not starve to death, given the nature of the Chinese people, there will definitely be no day for them to rebel.

Although he was slightly disappointed, Chongzhen still asked, "Yuanfu, what do you think?"

"Ah!" Shi Fenglai hurriedly came back to his senses and said, "It goes without saying that the one-whip method proposed by Lord Zhang is very effective, and the ingenuity of the method proposed by Your Majesty to distribute the tax on land is also amazing!"

"However, tax law reform always affects the entire system, and truly useful tax reform has never been easy to implement."

"In the distant past, there was Shang Yang's Reform, and recently there was Zhang Ge Lao's Single Whip Law. Neither of them can be easily implemented, and neither of them has not been criticized by... ignorant people!"

Chongzhen nodded. He saw that Shi Fenglai originally wanted to say that no one of them would not be opposed by the court and the people, but he was worried that he, the emperor, was the one who proposed it, so he tried to be as tactful as possible.

However, what Shi Fenglai knew, didn’t Chongzhen know?

(End of this chapter)